Paths of Glory | Page 8

cobbles chinked with turf;
and some of barbed wire--all of them, even to our inexperienced eyes,
seeming but flimsy defenses to interpose against a force of any size or
determination. But the Belgians appeared to set great store by these
playthings.
Behind each of them was a mixed group of soldiers--Garde Civique,
gendarmes and burgher volunteers. These latter mainly carried
shotguns and wore floppy blue caps and long blue blouses, which
buttoned down their backs with big horn buttons, like little girls'
pinafores. There was, we learned, a touch of sentiment about the
sudden appearance of those most unsoldierly looking vestments. In the
revolution of 1830, when the men of Brussels fought the Hollanders all
morning, stopped for dinner at midday and then fought again all
afternoon, and by alternately fighting and eating wore out the enemy
and won their national independence, they wore such caps and such
back-buttoning blouses. And so all night long women in the hospitals
had sat up cutting out and basting together the garments of glory for
their menfolk.
No one offered to turn us back, and only once or twice did a sentry
insist on looking at our passes. In the light of fuller experiences I know
now that when a city is about to fall into an enemy's hands the
authorities relax their vigilance and freely permit noncombatants to
depart therefrom, presumably on the assumption that the fewer
individuals there are in the place when the conqueror does come the
fewer the problems of caring for the resident population will be. But we

did not know this mighty significant fact; and, suspecting nothing, the
four innocents drove blithely on until the city lay behind us and the
country lay before us, brooding in the bright sunlight and all empty and
peaceful, except for thin scattering detachments of gaily clad Belgian
infantrymen through which we passed.
Once or twice tired, dirty stragglers, lying at the roadside, raised a
cheer as they recognized the small American flag that fluttered from
our taxi's door; and once we gave a lift to a Belgian bicycle courier,
who had grown too leg-weary to pedal his machine another inch. He
was the color of the dust through which he had ridden, and his face
under its dirt mask was thin and drawn with fatigue; but his racial
enthusiasm endured, and when we dropped him he insisted on shaking
hands with all of us, and offering us a drink out of a very warm and
very grimy bottle of something or other.
All of a sudden, rounding a bend, we came on a little valley with one of
the infrequent Belgian brooks bisecting it; and this whole valley was
full of soldiers. There must have been ten thousand of them--cavalry,
foot, artillery, baggage trains, and all. Quite near us was ranged a
battery of small rapid-fire guns; and the big rawboned dogs that had
hauled them there were lying under the wicked-looking little pieces.
We had heard a lot about the dog-drawn guns of the Belgians, but these
were the first of them we had seen.
Lines of cavalrymen were skirting crosswise over the low hill at the
other side of the valley, and against the sky line the figures of horses
and men stood out clear and fine. It all seemed a splendid martial sight;
but afterward, comparing this force with the army into whose front we
were to blunder unwittingly, we thought of it as a little handful of toy
soldiers playing at war. We never heard what became of those Belgians.
Presumably at the advance of the Germans coming down on them
countlessly, like an Old Testament locust plague, they fell back and,
going round Brussels, went northward toward Antwerp, to join the
main body of their own troops. Or they may have reached the lines of
the Allies, to the south and westward, toward the French frontier. One
guess would be as good as the other.

One of the puzzling things about the early mid-August stages of the
war was the almost instantaneous rapidity with which the Belgian army,
as an army, disintegrated and vanished. To-day it was here, giving a
good account of itself against tremendous odds, spending itself in
driblets to give the Allies a chance to get up. To-morrow it was utterly
gone.
Still without being halted or delayed we went briskly on. We had
topped the next rise commanding the next valley, and--except for a few
stragglers and some skirmishers--the Belgians were quite out of sight,
when our driver stopped with an abruptness which piled his four
passengers in a heap and pointed off to the northwest, a queer, startled,
frightened look on his broad Flemish face. There was smoke there
along the horizon--much smoke, both white and dark; and, even as the
throb