in my hand, I held up my arms high and asked who spoke English.  It turned out that the enthusiast spoke that language, and I suggested he did not need so many guns and that he could find my papers in my inside pocket.  With four automatics rubbing against my ribs, I would not have lowered my arms for all the papers in the Bank of England.  They took me to a cafe, where their colonel had just finished lunch and was in a most genial humor.  First he gave the enthusiast a drink as a reward for arresting me, and then, impartially, gave me one for being arrested.  He wrote on my passport that I could go to Enghien, which was two miles distant.  That pass enabled me to proceed unmolested for nearly two hundred yards.  I was then again arrested and taken before another group of officers.  This time they searched my knapsack and wanted to requisition my maps, but one of them pointed out they were only automobile maps and, as compared to their own, of no value.  They permitted me to proceed to Enghien.  I went to Enghien, intending to spend the night and on the morning continue.  I could not see why I might not be able to go on indefinitely.

As yet no one who had held me up had suggested I should turn back, and as long as I was willing to be arrested it seemed as though I might accompany the German army even to the gates of Paris.  But my reception in Enghien should have warned me to get back to Brussels.  The Germans, thinking I was an English spy, scowled at me; and the Belgians, thinking the same thing, winked at me; and the landlord of the only hotel said I was “suspect” and would not give me a bed.  But I sought out the burgomaster, a most charming man named Delano, and he wrote out a pass permitting me to sleep one night in Enghien.

“You really do not need this,” he said; “as an American you are free to stay here as long as you wish.”  Then he, too, winked.

“But I am an American,” I protested.

“But certainly,” he said gravely, and again he winked.  It was then I should have started back to Brussels.  Instead, I sat on a moss-covered, arched stone bridge that binds the town together, and until night fell watched the gray tidal waves rush up and across it, stamping, tripping, stumbling, beating the broad, clean stones with thousands of iron heels, steel hoofs, steel chains, and steel-rimmed wheels.  You hated it, and yet could not keep away.  The Belgians of Enghien hated it, and they could not keep away.  Like a great river in flood, bearing with it destruction and death, you feared and loathed it, and yet it fascinated you and pulled you to the brink.  All through the night, as already for three nights and three days at Brussels, I had heard it; it rumbled and growled, rushing forward without pause or breath, with inhuman, pitiless persistence.  At daybreak I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered whether to go on or turn back.  I still wanted some one in authority, higher than myself, to order me back.  So, at six, riding for a fall, to find that one, I went, as I thought, along the road to Soignes.  The gray tidal wave was still roaring past.  It was pressing forward with greater speed, but in nothing else did it differ from the tidal wave that had swept through Brussels.