Except that the cafes were empty of Belgian officers, and of English correspondents, whom, had they remained, the Germans would have arrested, there was not, up to late in the afternoon of the 19th of August, in the life and conduct of the citizens any perceptible change.  They could not have shown a finer spirit.  They did not know the city would not be defended; and yet with before them on the morrow the prospect of a battle which Burgomaster Max had announced would be contested to the very heart of the city, as usual the cafes blazed like open fire-places and the people sat at the little iron tables.  Even when, like great buzzards, two German aeroplanes sailed slowly across Brussels, casting shadows of events to come, the people regarded them only with curiosity.  The next morning the shops were open, the streets were crowded.  But overnight the soldier-king had sent word that Brussels must not oppose the invaders; and at the gendarmerie the civil guard, reluctantly and protesting, some even in tears, turned in their rifles and uniforms.

The change came at ten in the morning.  It was as though a wand had waved and from a fete-day on the Continent we had been wafted to London on a rainy Sunday.  The boulevards fell suddenly empty.  There was not a house that was not closely shuttered.  Along the route by which we now knew the Germans were advancing, it was as though the plague stalked.  That no one should fire from a window, that to the conquerors no one should offer insult, Burgomaster Max sent out as special constables men he trusted.  Their badge of authority was a walking-stick and a piece of paper fluttering from a buttonhole.  These, the police, and the servants and caretakers of the houses that lined the boulevards alone were visible.  At eleven o’clock, unobserved but by this official audience, down the Boulevard Waterloo came the advance-guard of the German army.  It consisted of three men, a captain and two privates on bicycles.  Their rifles were slung across their shoulders, they rode unwarily, with as little concern as the members of a touring-club out for a holiday.  Behind them, so close upon each other that to cross from one sidewalk to the other was not possible, came the Uhlans, infantry, and the guns.  For two hours I watched them, and then, bored with the monotony of it, returned to the hotel.  After an hour, from beneath my window, I still could hear them; another hour and another went by.  They still were passing.

Boredom gave way to wonder.  The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed.  No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain.  It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike.  It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling toward you across the sea.  The uniform aided this impression.  In it each man moved under a cloak of invisibility.  Only after the most numerous and severe tests at all distances, with all materials and combinations of colors that give forth no color, could this gray have been discovered.  That it was selected to clothe and disguise the German when he fights is typical of the General Staff, in striving for efficiency, to leave nothing to chance, to neglect no detail.