showed where the barricades and machine-guns had been.  The windows of many of the houses were stuffed with mattresses and pillows, behind which the riflemen had made a stand.  Lierre and Waelhem and Duffel were like sieves dripping blood.  Corpses were strewn everywhere.  Some of the dead were spread-eagled on their backs as though exhausted after a long march, some were twisted and crumpled in attitudes grotesque and horrible, some were propped up against the walls of houses to which they had tried to crawl in their agony.

All of them stared at nothing with awful, unseeing eyes.  It was one of the scenes that I should like to forget.  But I never can.

On Tuesday evening General de Guise, the military governor of Antwerp, informed the Government that the Belgian position was fast becoming untenable and, acting on this information, the capital of Belgium was transferred from Antwerp to Ostend, the members of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps leaving at daybreak on Wednesday by special steamer, while at the same time Mr. Winston Churchill departed for the coast by automobile under convoy of an armoured motorcar.  His last act was to order the destruction of the condensers of the German vessels in the harbour, for which the Germans, upon occupying the city, demanded an indemnity of twenty million francs.

As late as Wednesday morning the great majority of the inhabitants of Antwerp remained in total ignorance of the real state of affairs.  Morning after morning the Matin and the Metropole had published official communiques categorically denying that any of the forts had been silenced and asserting in the most positive terms that the enemy was being held in check all along the line.  As a result of this policy of denial and deception, the people of Antwerp went to sleep on Tuesday night calmly confident that in a few days more the Germans would raise the siege from sheer discouragement and depart.  Imagine what happened, then, when they awoke on Wednesday morning, October 7, to learn that the Government had stolen away between two days without issuing so much as a word of warning, and to find staring at them from every wall and hoarding proclamations signed by the military governor announcing that the bombardment of the city was imminent, urging all who were able to leave instantly, and advising those who remained to shelter themselves behind sand-bags in their cellars.  It was like waiting until the entire first floor of a house was in flames and the occupants’ means of escape almost cut off, before shouting “Fire!”

No one who witnessed the exodus of the population from Antwerp will ever forget it.  No words can adequately describe it.  It was not a flight; it was a stampede.  The sober, slow-moving, slow-thinking Flemish townspeople were suddenly transformed into a herd of terror-stricken cattle.  So complete was the German enveloping movement that only three avenues of escape remained open:  westward, through