One of the most inspiring features of the campaign in Belgium was the heroism displayed by the priests and the members of the religious orders.  Village cures in their black cassocks and shovel hats, and monks in sandals and brown woollen robes, were everywhere.  I saw them in the trenches exhorting the soldiers to fight to the last for God and the King; I saw them going out on to the battlefield with stretchers to gather the wounded under a fire which made veterans seek shelter; I saw them in the villages where the big shells were falling, helping to carry away the ill and the aged; I saw them in the hospitals taking farewell messages and administering the last sacrament to the dying; I even saw them, rifle in hand, on the firing-line, fighting for the existence of the nation.  To these soldiers of the Lord I raise my hat in respect and admiration.  The people of Belgium owe them a debt that they can never repay.

In the days before the war it was commonly said that the Church was losing ground in Belgium; that religion was gradually being ousted by socialism.  If this were so, I saw no sign of it in the nation’s days of trial.  Time and time again I saw soldiers before going into battle drop on their knees and cross themselves and murmur a hasty prayer.  Even the throngs of terrified fugitives, flying from their burning villages, would pause in their flight to kneel before the little shrines along the wayside.  I am convinced, indeed, that the ruthless destruction of religious edifices by the Germans and the brutality which they displayed toward priests and members of the religious orders was more responsible than any one thing for the desperate resistance which they met with from the Belgian peasantry.

By the afternoon of October 3 things were looking very black for Antwerp.  The forts composing the Lierre-Waelhem sector of the outer line of defences had been pounded into silence by the German siege-guns; a strong German force, pushing through the breach thus made, had succeeded in crossing the Nethe in the face of desperate opposition; the Belgian troops, after a fortnight of continuous fighting, were at the point of exhaustion; the hospitals were swamped by the streams of wounded which for days past had been pouring in; over the city hung a cloud of despondency and gloom, for the people, though kept in complete ignorance of the true state of affairs, seemed oppressed with a sense of impending disaster.

When I returned that evening to the Hotel St. Antoine from the battle-front, which was then barely half a dozen miles outside the city, the manager stopped me as I was entering the lift.

“Are you leaving with the others, Mr. Powell?” he whispered.

“Leaving for where?  With what others?” I asked sharply.

“Hadn’t you heard?” he answered in some confusion.  “The members of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps are leaving for Ostend by special steamer at seven in the morning.  It has just been decided at a Cabinet meeting.  But don’t mention it to a soul.  No one is to know it until they are safely gone.”