At our approach to the great Meuse bridge an officer shouted into each compartment: 

“Every window closed.  All cigars and pipes extinguished.”

“Why?” we asked.

“The bridge is mined with explosives and a stray spark might set them off,” a soldier informed us.

The first German attempt to set foot on the bridge would be the signal for sending the great structure crashing skywards.

The end of the run was Maastricht, now become a town of crucial interest.  It was like a city besieged.  Barricades of barbed wire and paving stones ripped from street ran everywhere.  Iron rails and ties blocked the exits and the small cannon disconcertingly thrust their nozzles down upon one out of the windows.

I lingered here long enough to secure a carriage and with it made quick time across the harvest fields.  We were soon up on the little hill back of Meuse.  The sun was sinking and for the first time war, in all its terrible spectacular splendor, smote me hard.  From the hill at my feet there stretched away a great plain filled with a dense mass of German soldiery.  One could scarcely believe that there were men there so well did their gray-green coats blend with the landscape.  One would think that they were indeed a part of it, could he not feel the atmosphere vibrant with the mass personality of the myriad warriors tramping down the crops of the peasants.  In the rear the commissariat vans and artillery still came lumbering up, while in the very front pranced the horses of the dreaded Uhlans, who looked with contempt, I imagined, on the Dutch soldiers as they stood there with the warning that here was Netherlands soil.

In the fighting German and Belgian troops had already been pushed up against this line.  Here they were greeted with the challenge:  “Lay down your arms.  This is the neutral soil of Holland.”  Thus many were interned until the end of the war.

As even darkened into night, the endless plain became stippled over with points of flame from countless campfires.  There were beauty and mystery in this vast menace sweeping the soul of the onlooker now with horror, and now with admiration.  There was a terrible background to the spectacle—­glowing red and luminous.  It was made of the still blazing towns of Mouland and Vise, burned to the ground by order of the invaders.  The fire had been set as a warning to the inhabitants round about.  They were taking the warning and hastening by the thousands across the border into Holland, their only haven of safety.

When we drove down from the hill into Eysden, we were in the midst of these peasants, fleeing before the red wrath rolling up into the sky.  They came shambling in with a few possessions on which they had hurriedly laid their hands, singly or in families, a pitiful procession of the disinherited.