The secrecy maintained by the press and the people regarding anything concerning the war, the knowledge of which might embarrass the War Office, was one of the most admirable and remarkable conspiracies of silence that modern times have known.  Officers of the same regiment even with each other would not discuss the orders they had received.  In no single newspaper, with no matter how lurid a past record for sensationalism, was there a line to suggest that a British army had landed in France and that Great Britain was at war.  Sooner than embarrass those who were conducting the fight, the individual English man and woman in silence suffered the most cruel anxiety of mind.  Of that, on my return to London from Brussels, I was given an illustration.  I had written to The Daily Chronicle telling where in Belgium I had seen a wrecked British airship, and beside it the grave of the aviator.  I gave the information in order that the family of the dead officer might find the grave and bring the body home.  The morning the letter was published an elderly gentleman, a retired officer of the navy, called at my rooms.  His son, he said, was an aviator, and for a month of him no word had come.  His mother was distressed.  Could I describe the air-ship I had seen?

I was not keen to play the messenger of ill tidings, so I tried to gain time.

“What make of aeroplane does your son drive?” I asked.

As though preparing for a blow, the old gentleman drew himself up, and looked me steadily in the eyes.

“A Bleriot monoplane,” he said.

I was as relieved as though his boy were one of my own kinsmen.

“The air-ship I saw,” I told him, “was an Avro biplane!”

Of the two I appeared much the more pleased.

The retired officer bowed.

“I thank you,” he said.  “It will be good news for his mother.”

“But why didn’t you go to the War Office?” I asked.

He reproved me firmly.

“They have asked us not to question them,” he said, “and when they are working for all I have no right to embarrass them with my personal trouble.”

As the chance of obtaining credentials with the British army appeared doubtful, I did not remain in London, but at once crossed to Belgium.

Before the Germans came, Brussels was an imitation Paris—­ especially along the inner boulevards she was Paris at her best.  And her great parks, her lakes gay with pleasure-boats or choked with lily-pads, her haunted forests, where your taxicab would startle the wild deer, are the most beautiful I have ever seen in any city in the world.  As, in the days of the Second Empire, Louis Napoleon bedecked Paris, so Leopold decorated Brussels.  In her honor and to his own glory he gave her new parks, filled in her moats along her ancient fortifications, laid out boulevards shaded with trees, erected arches, monuments, museums.  That these jewels he hung upon her neck were wrung from the slaves of the Congo does not make them the less beautiful.  And before the Germans came the life of the people of Brussels was in keeping with the elegance, beauty, and joyousness of their surroundings.