Service was normal in the cafes.  To the accompaniment of music and clinking glasses the dress-suited waiter served me a five-course lunch for two francs.  It was uncanny to see this blaze of life while the city sat under the shadow of a grave disaster.  At any moment the gray German tide might break out of Brussels and pour its turbid flood of soldiers through these very streets.  Even now a Taube hovered in the sky, and from the skirmish-line an occasional ambulance rumbled in with its crimsoned load.

I chanced into Gambrinus’ cafe and was lost in the babbling sea of French and Flemish.  Above the melee of sounds, however, I caught a gladdening bit of English.  Turning about, I espied a little group of men whose plain clothes stood out in contrast to the colored uniforms of officers and soldiers crowded into the cafe.  Wearied of my efforts at conversing in a foreign tongue, I went over and said:  “Do you really speak English!” “Well, rather!” answered the one who seemed to act as leader of the group.  “We are the only ones now and it will be scarcer still around here in a few days.”  “Why!” I asked.

“Because Ghent will be in German hands.”  This brought an emphatic denial from one of his confreres who insisted that the Germans had already reached the end of their rope.  A certain correspondent, joining in the argument, came in for a deal of banter for taking the war de luxe in a good hotel far from the front.

“What do you know about the war?” they twitted him.  “You’ve pumped all your best stories out of the refugees ten miles from the front, after priming them with a glass of beer.”

They were a group of young war-photographers to whom danger was a magnet.  Though none of them had yet reached the age of thirty, they had seen service in all the stirring events of Europe and even around the globe.  Where the clouds lowered and the seas tossed, there they flocked.  Like stormy petrels they rushed to the center of the swirling world.  That was their element.  A free-lance, a representative of the Northcliffe press, and two movie-men comprised this little group and made an island of English amidst the general babel.

Like most men who have seen much of the world, they had ceased to be cynics.  When I came to them out of the rain, carrying no other introduction than a dripping overcoat, they welcomed me into their company and whiled away the evening with tales of the Balkan wars.

They were in high spirits over their exploits of the previous day, when the Germans, withdrawing from Melle on the outskirts of the city, had left a long row of cottages still burning.  As the enemy troops pulled out the further end of the street, the movie men came in at the other and caught the pictures of the still blazing houses.  We went down to view them on the screen.  To the gentle throbbing of drums and piano, the citizens of Ghent viewed the unique spectacle of their own suburbs going up in smoke.