Paths of Glory | Page 7

and when a little later we rode past the royal palace
we saw that it had been converted into a big hospital for the wounded.
That night, also, the government ran away to Antwerp; but of this we
knew nothing until the following morning.
Next day we heard tales: Uhlans had been seen almost in the suburbs;
three German spies, disguised as nuns, had been captured, tried,
convicted and were no longer with us; sentries on duty outside the
residence of the American Minister had fired at a German aeroplane
darting overhead; French troops were drawing in to the northward and
English soldiers were hurrying up from the south; trainloads of
wounded had been brought in under cover of the night and distributed
among the improvised hospitals; but, conceding these things to be true,
we knew of them only at second hand. By the evidence of what we
ourselves saw we were able to note few shifts in the superficial aspects
of the city.
The Garde Civique seemed a trifle more numerous than it had been the
evening before; citizen volunteers, still in civilian garb, appeared on the
streets in awkward squads, carrying their guns and side arms clumsily;
and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out the beautiful
Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high barricade
across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois; also, they
were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade trees. That
was all.
And then, as though to offset these added suggestions of danger, we
saw children playing about quietly behind the piled sand-bags, guarded
by plump Flemish nursemaids, and smart dogcarts constantly passed
and repassed us, filled with well-dressed women, and with flowers
stuck in the whip-sockets.

The nearer we got to this war the farther away from us it seemed to be.
We began to regard it as an elusive, silent, secretive, hide-and-go-seek
war, which would evade us always. We resolved to pursue it into the
country to the northward, from whence the Germans were reported to
be advancing, crushing back the outnumbered Belgians as they came
onward; but when we tried to secure a laissez passer at the gendarmerie,
where until then an accredited correspondent might get himself a
laissez passer, we bumped into obstacles.
In an inclosed courtyard behind a big gray building, among loaded
wagons of supplies and munching cart horses, a kitchen table teetered
unsteadily on its legs on the rough cobbles. On the table were pens and
inkpots and coffee cups and beer bottles and beer glasses; and about it
sat certain unkempt men in resplendent but unbrushed costumes.
Joseph himself--the Joseph of the coat of many colors, no less--might
have devised the uniforms they wore. With that setting the picture they
made there in the courtyard was suggestive of stage scenes in plays of
the French Revolution.
They were polite enough, these piebald gentlemen, and they considered
our credentials with an air of mildly courteous interest; but they would
give us no passes. There had been an order. Who had issued it, or why,
was not for us to know. Going away from there, all downcast and
disappointed, we met a French cavalryman. He limped along in his
high dragoon boots, walking with the wide-legged gait of one who had
bestraddled leather for many hours and was sore from it. His horse,
which he led by the bridle, stumbled with weariness. A proud boy scout
was serving as his guide. He was the only soldier of any army, except
the Belgian, we had seen so far, and we halted our car and watched him
until he disappeared.
However, seeing one tired French dragoon was not seeing the war; and
we chafed that night at the delay which kept us penned as prisoners in
this handsome, outwardly quiet city. As we figured it we might be
housed up here for days or weeks and miss all the operations in the
field. When morning came, though, we discovered that the bars were
down again, and that certificates signed by the American consul would

be sufficient to carry us as far as the outlying suburbs at least.
Securing these precious papers, then, without delay we chartered a
rickety red taxicab for the day; and piling in we told the driver to take
us eastward as far as he could go before the outposts turned us back. He
took us, therefore, at a buzzing clip through the Bois, along one flank
of the magnificent Forest of Soigne, with its miles of green- trunked
beech trees, and by way of the royal park of Tervueren. From the edge
of the thickly settled district onward we passed barricade after
barricade--some built of newly felled trees; some of street cars drawn
across the road in double rows; some of street