It was in Calais, to which I had gone back for a day or two, that I found my chance to get into the firing lines in Belgium.  I was sitting at an open window with my two friends when I saw a lady’s face in the street.  The last time I had seen it was in an old English mansion, filled with many gallant and gentle ghosts of history, and with laughing girls who went scampering out to a game of tennis on the lawn below the terrace from which a scent of roses and climbing plants was wafted up on the drowsy air of an English summer.  It was strange to see one of those girls in Calais, where such a different game was being played.  She had a gravity in her eyes which I had not seen before in England, and yet, afterwards, I heard her laughter ring out within a little distance of bursting shells.  She had a motor-car and a pass to the Belgian front, and a good, nature which gave me a free seat, provided I was “jolly quick.”  I was so quick that, with a few things scrambled into a handbag, I was ready in two shakes of a jiffy, whatever that may be, and had only time to give a hasty grip to the hands of the two friends who had gone along many roads with me in this adventure of war, watching its amazing dramas.  The Philosopher and the Strategist are but shadows in this book, but though I left them on the kerbstone, I took with me the memory of a comradeship which had been good to have.

6

The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the Yser canal and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude, Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of Belgian soil.  I drove into the Grande Place and saw the beauty of this old Flemish square, typical of a hundred others, not less quaint and with not less dignity, which had been smashed to pieces by German guns.  Three great buildings dominated its architecture—­the Town Hall, with a fine stately facade, and two ancient churches, with massive brick towers, overshadowing the narrow old houses and timber-front shops with stepped gables and wrought-iron signs.  For three centuries or more time had slept here, and no change of modern life had altered the character of this place, where merchant princes had dwelt around the market.  If there had been peace here in that velvety twilight which filled the square when I first passed through it, I should have expected to see grave burghers in furred hoods pacing across the cobble stones to the Hotel de Ville, and the florid-faced knights whom Franz Hals loved to paint, quaffing wine inside the Hotel de la Couronne, and perhaps a young king in exile known as the Merry Monarch smiling with a roguish eye at some fair-haired Flemish wench as he leaned on the arm of my lord of Rochester on his way to his lodging on the other side of the way.  But here