At this juncture, I remember, a great light flared suddenly up.  It was one of the fans of a wind-mill fired by the Germans.  In the foreground we could see the soldiers standing like so many gray wolves silhouetted against the red flames.  In that light it did seem that motives other than pure affection might have prompted the Police Commissioner’s action.  The hectic sleep of the night was broken by the endless clatter of the hoofs of the German cavalry pushing south.

My courage rose, however, with the rising sun.  In the morning I climbed to the lookout on the hill.  The hosts had vanished.  A trampled, smoldering fire-blackened land lay before me.  But there was the lure of the unknown.  I walked down to where the great Netherlands flag proclaimed neutral soil.  The worried Dutch pickets honored the signature of Souten and with one step I was over the border into Belgium, now under German jurisdiction.  The helmeted soldiers across the way were a distinct disappointment.  They looked neither fierce nor fiery.  In fact, they greeted me with a smile.  They were a bit puzzled by my paper, but the seal seemed echt-Deutsch and they pronounced it “gut, sehr gut.”  I explained that I wished to go forwards to Liege.

“Was it possible?”

For answer they shrugged their shoulders.

“Was it dangerous?”

“Not in the least,” they assured me.

The Germans were right.  It was not dangerous—­that is, for the Germans.  By repeatedly proclaiming the everlasting friendship of Germany and America, and passing out some chocolate, I made good friends on the home base.  They charged me only not to return after sundown, giving point to their advice by relating how, on the previous night, they had shot down a peasant woman and her two children who, under the cloak of darkness, sought to scurry past the sentinels.  They told this with a genuine note of grief in their voices.  So, with a hearty hand-shake and wishes for the best of luck, they waved adieu to me as I went swinging out on the highroad to Liege.

Chapter VI

In The Black Wake Of The War

A half mile and I came for the first time actually face to face with the wastage of war.  There was what once was Mouland, the little village I had seen burning the night before.  The houses stood roofless and open to the sky, like so many tombstones over a departed people.  The whitewashed outer walls were all shining in the morning sun.  Inside they were charred black, or blazing yet with coals from the fire still slowly burning its way through wood and plaster.  Here and there a house had escaped the torch.

By some miracle in the smashed window of one of these houses a bright red geranium blossomed.  It seemed to cry for water, but I dared not turn aside, for fear of a bullet from a lurking sentry.  In another a sewing-machine of American make testified to the thrift and progressiveness of one household.  In the last house as I left the village a rocking-horse with its head stuck through the open door smiled its wooden smile, as if at any rate it could keep good cheer even though the roofs might fall.