After a little I realised that this was rather more war than I had expected.  The fascines were slippery; the path only four or five feet wide.  On each side was the water, hideous with many secrets.

I stopped, a third of the way out, and looked back.  It looked about as dangerous in one direction as another.  So we went on.  Once I slipped and fell.  And now, looming out of the moonlight, I could see the outpost which was the object of our visit.

I have always been grateful to that Belgian lieutenant for his mistake.  Just how grateful I might have been had anything untoward happened, I cannot say.  But the excursion was worth all the risk, and more.

On a bit of high ground stands what was once the tiny hamlet of Oudstuyvenskerke—­the ruins of two small white houses and the tower of the destroyed church—­hardly a tower any more, for only three sides of it are standing and they are riddled with great shell holes.

Six hundred feet beyond this tower were the German trenches.  The little island was hardly a hundred feet in its greatest dimension.

I wish I could make those people who think that war is good for a country see that Belgian outpost as I saw it that night under the moonlight.  Perhaps we were under suspicion; I do not know.  Suddenly the fusees, which had ceased for a time, began again, and with their white light added to that of the moon the desolate picture of that tiny island was a picture of the war.  There was nothing lacking.  There was the beauty of the moonlit waters, there was the tragedy of the destroyed houses and the church, and there was the horror of unburied bodies.

There was heroism, too, of the kind that will make Belgium live in history.  For in the top of that church tower for months a Capuchin monk has held his position alone and unrelieved.  He has a telephone, and he gains access to his position in the tower by means of a rope ladder which he draws up after him.

Furious fighting has taken place again and again round the base of the tower.  The German shells assail it constantly.  But when I left Belgium the Capuchin monk, who has become a soldier, was still on duty; still telephoning the ranges of the gun; still notifying headquarters of German preparations for a charge.

Some day the church tower will fall and he will go with it, or it will be captured; one or the other is inevitable.  Perhaps it has already happened; for not long ago I saw in the newspapers that furious fighting was taking place at this very spot.

He came down and I talked to him—­a little man, regarding his situation as quite ordinary, and looking quaintly unpriestlike in his uniform of a Belgian officer with its tasselled cap.  Some day a great story will be written of these priests of Belgium who have left their churches to fight.

We spoke in whispers.  There was after all very little to say.  It would have embarrassed him horribly had any one told him that he was a heroic figure.  And the ordinary small talk is not currency in such a situation.