The maitre d’hotel, Emil, groped his way to my table and struck a match.

“Aeroplanes!” he said.

There was much laughing and talking as the officers moved to the door.  The heavy velvet curtains were drawn.  Some one near the door lighted a candle.

“Where shall I go?” I asked.

Emil, unlike the officers, was evidently nervous.

“Madame is as safe here as anywhere,” he said.  “But if she wishes to join the others in the cellar—­”

I wanted to go to the cellar or to crawl into the office safe.  But I felt that, as the only woman and the only American about, I held the reputation of America and of my sex in my hands.  The waiters had gone to the cellar.  The officers had flocked to the cafe on the ground floor underneath.  The alarm bell was still ringing.  Over the candle, stuck in a saucer, Emil’s face looked white and drawn.

“I shall stay here,” I said.  “And I shall have coffee.”

The coffee was not bravado.  I needed something hot.

The gun, which had ceased, began to fire again.  And then suddenly, not far away, a bomb exploded.  Even through the closed and curtained windows the noise was terrific.  Emil placed my coffee before me with shaking hands, and disappeared.

Another crash, and another, both very close!

There is nothing that I know of more hideous than an aerial bombardment.  It requires an entire mental readjustment.  The sky, which has always symbolised peace, suddenly spells death.  Bombardment by the big guns of an advancing army is not unexpected.  There is time for flight, a chance, too, for a reprisal.  But against these raiders of the sky there is nothing.  One sits and waits.  And no town is safe.  One moment there is a peaceful village with war twenty, fifty miles away.  The next minute hell breaks loose.  Houses are destroyed.  Sleeping children die in their cradles.  The streets echo and reecho with the din of destruction.  The reply of the anti-aircraft guns is feeble, and at night futile.  There is no bustle of escape.  The streets are empty and dead, and in each house people, family groups, noncombatants, folk who ask only the right to work and love and live, sit and wait with blanched faces.

More explosions, nearer still.  They were trying for the Mairie, which was round the corner.

In the corridor outside the dining room a candle was lighted, and the English officer who had reassured me earlier in the evening came in.

“You need not be alarmed,” he said cheerfully.  “It is really nothing.  But out in the corridor it is quite safe and not so lonely.”

I went out.  Two or three Belgian officers were there, gathered round a table on which was a candle stuck in a glass.  They were having their after-dinner liqueurs and talking of many things.  No one spoke of what was happening outside.  I was given a corner, as being out of the draft.