At last he recognized the Havels’ team along way off, and he stopped and waited for Ernest beside a thorny hedge, looking thoughtfully about him.  The sun was already low.  It hung above the stubble, all milky and rosy with the heat, like the image of a sun reflected in grey water.  In the east the full moon had just risen, and its thin silver surface was flushed with pink until it looked exactly like the setting sun.  Except for the place each occupied in the heavens, Claude could not have told which was which.  They rested upon opposite rims of the world, two bright shields, and regarded each other, as if they, too, had met by appointment.

Claude and Ernest sprang to the ground at the same instant and shook hands, feeling that they had not seen each other for a long while.

“Well, what do you make of it, Ernest?”

The young man shook his head cautiously, but replied no further.  He patted his horses and eased the collars on their necks.

“I waited in town for the Hastings paper,” Claude went on impatiently.  “England declared war last night.”

“The Germans,” said Ernest, “are at Liege.  I know where that is.  I sailed from Antwerp when I came over here.”

“Yes, I saw that.  Can the Belgians do anything?”

“Nothing.”  Ernest leaned against the wagon wheel and drawing his pipe from his pocket slowly filled it.  “Nobody can do anything.  The German army will go where it pleases.”

“If it’s as bad as that, why are the Belgians putting up a fight?”

“I don’t know.  It’s fine, but it will come to nothing in the end.  Let me tell you something about the German army, Claude.”

Pacing up and down beside the locust hedge, Ernest rehearsed the great argument; preparation, organization, concentration, inexhaustible resources, inexhaustible men.  While he talked the sun disappeared, the moon contracted, solidified, and slowly climbed the pale sky.  The fields were still glimmering with the bland reflection left over from daylight, and the distance grew shadowy,—­not dark, but seemingly full of sleep.

“If I were at home,” Ernest concluded, “I would be in the Austrian army this minute.  I guess all my cousins and nephews are fighting the Russians or the Belgians already.  How would you like it yourself, to be marched into a peaceful country like this, in the middle of harvest, and begin to destroy it?”

“I wouldn’t do it, of course.  I’d desert and be shot.”

“Then your family would be persecuted.  Your brothers, maybe even your father, would be made orderlies to Austrian officers and be kicked in the mouth.”

“I wouldn’t bother about that.  I’d let my male relatives decide for themselves how often they would be kicked.”

Ernest shrugged his shoulders.  “You Americans brag like little boys; you would and you wouldn’t!  I tell you, nobody’s will has anything to do with this.  It is the harvest of all that has been planted.  I never thought it would come in my life-time, but I knew it would come.”