Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them | Page 5

It was interesting to watch this square little man roll sturdily along, throwing out his stout arms impatiently and flinging at the nervous villagers--who treated him almost as a sort of feudal lord--guttural Flemish commands to keep cool and not make fools of themselves.
All at once, coming out of nowhere, a wave of panic swept down the street like a squall across a still pond.
"Bing--Bang!" went wooden shutters over windows, the stout housewives flinging the bars home and gathering up their children. Doors slammed, windows closed--it was like something in a play--and almost as soon as it takes to tell it there was not a head, not a sound; the low houses were one blank wall, and we stood in the street alone.
Just such scenes as this people must have known in the days when Europe was a general battle-ground--when the French or the Spanish came into Flanders; just such villages, just such housewives slamming shutters close--you can see them now in old Flemish pictures.
Slowly doors and windows opened, heads poked out. The little street filled, the knots of people gathered again. We walked up and down, the linen merchant flinging out his arms and his reassurances more and more vigorously. Half an hour passed, and then, all at once, it came again. And this time it was real. The Germans were coming!
Down the straight, paved highway, a mile or so away, at the farther end of an avenue of elms which framed them like a tunnel, was a band of horsemen. They were coming at an easy trot, half a dozen in single file on either side of the road. We could see their lances, held rakishly upstanding across the saddle, then the tail of the near horse whisking to and fro. One, crossing over, was outlined against the sky, and those who could see whispered: "One is standing sidewise!" as if this were somehow important. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the women huddled inside the door before which we stood.
Coming nearer and nearer up that long tunnel of trees, like one of those unescapable things seen in dreams, the little gray spot of moving figures grew to strange proportions--"the Germans!"--front of that frightful avalanche. A few hundred yards away they pulled down to a walk, and slowly, peering sharply out from under their helmets, entered the silent street. Another moment and the leader was alongside, and we found ourselves looking up at a boy, not more than twenty he seemed, with blue eyes and a clean-cut, gentle face. He passed without a look or word, but behind him a young officer, soldier-like and smart in the Prussian fashion, with a half-opened map in his hand, asked the way to a near-by village. He took the linen merchant's direction without pausing and the horses swung down the side street. "Do you speak English?" he called back, as if, in happier times, we might have been friends, and, without waiting for an answer, trotted on into the growing dusk.
They were but one of hundreds of such squads of light cavalry--uhlans for the most part--ranging all over western Belgium as far as Ostend, a dozen or so men in hostile country, prepared to be cut to pieces if they found the enemy they were looking for, or to be caught from ambush at any time by some squad of civic guards. But as one watched them disappear down their long road to France they grew into something more than that. And in the twilight of the quiet countryside these stern shapes that rode on without turning, lances upstanding from tired shoulders, became strange, grotesque, pathetic--again the Germans, legions of the War Lord, come too late into a world which must crush them at last, Knights of the Frightful Adventure, riding to their death.




Chapter II
Paris At Bay

The Calais and Boulogne routes were already closed. Dieppe and Havre might at any moment follow. You must go now, people said in London, if you want to get there at all.
And yet the boat was crowded as it left Folkstone. In bright afternoon sunshine we hurried over the Channel, empty of any sign of war, unless war showed in its very emptiness. Next to me sat a young Frenchman, different from those we had met before hurrying home to fight. Good-looking, tall, and rather languid in manner, he spoke English with an English accent, and you would have taken him for an Englishman. A big canvas bag full of golf-clubs leaned against the wall behind him, and he had been trying to play golf at one of the east-coast seaside places in England. But one couldn't play in a time like this, and the young man sighed and waved his hands rather desperately--one couldn't settle down to anything. So he was going home. To