Bullets began to smash the tiles above us.  “This is no place for two innocent little American boys,” remarked Thompson, shouldering his camera.  I agreed with him.  By the time we reached the ground the Belgian infantry was half a mile in our rear, and to reach the car we had to cross nearly a mile of open field.  Bullets were singing across it and kicking up little spurts of brown earth where they struck.  We had not gone a hundred yards when the German artillery, which the Belgians so confidently asserted had been silenced, opened with shrapnel.  Have you ever heard a winter gale howling and shrieking through the tree-tops?  Of course.  Then you know what shrapnel sounds like, only it is louder.  You have no idea though how extremely annoying shrapnel is, when it bursts in your immediate vicinity.  You feel as though you would like nothing in the world so much as to be suddenly transformed into a woodchuck and have a convenient hole.  I remembered that an artillery officer had told me that a burst of shrapnel from a battery two miles away will spread itself over an eight-acre field, and every time I heard the moan of an approaching shell I wondered if it would decide to explode in the particular eight-acre field in which I happened to be.

As though the German shell-storm was not making things sufficiently uncomfortable for us, when we were half-way across the field two Belgian soldiers suddenly rose from a trench and covered us with their rifles.  “Halt!  Hands up!” they shouted.  There was nothing for it but to obey them.  We advanced with our hands in the air but with our heads twisted upward on the look-out for shrapnel.  As we approached they recognized us.  “Oh, you’re the Americans,” said one of them, lowering his rifle.  “We couldn’t see your faces and we took you for Germans.  You’d better come with us.  It’s getting too hot to stay here.”  The four of us started on a run for a little cluster of houses a few hundred yards away.  By this time the shells were coming across at the rate of twenty a minute.

“Suppose we go into a cellar until the storm blows over,” suggested Roos, who had joined us.  “I’m all for that,” said I, making a dive for the nearest doorway.  “Keep away from that house!” shouted a Belgian soldier who suddenly appeared from around a corner.  “The man who owns it has gone insane from fright.  He’s upstairs with a rifle and he’s shooting at every one who passes.”  “Well, I call that damned inhospitable,” said Thompson, and Roos and I heartily agreed with him.  There was nothing else for it, therefore, but to make a dash for the car.  We had left it standing in front of a convent over which a Red Cross flag was flying on the assumption that there it would be perfectly safe.  But we found that we were mistaken.  The Red Cross flag did not spell protection by any means.  As we came within sight of the car a shell burst within thirty feet of it, a fragment of the projectile burying itself in the door.  I never knew of a car taking so long to crank.  Though it was really probably only a matter of seconds before the engine started it seemed to us, standing in that shell-swept road, like hours.