We had been barely half an hour hanging about Baerlaere, but it seemed as if we had wasted a whole afternoon there. At last we started. We were told to drive fast, as the fire might open on us at any minute. We drove very fast. Our road lay through open country flat to the river, with no sort of cover anywhere from the German fire, if it chose to come. About half a mile ahead of us was a small hamlet that had been shelled. Mr. L. told us to duck when we heard the guns. I remember thinking that I particularly didn't want to be wounded in my right arm, and that as I sat with my right arm resting on the ledge of the car it was somewhat exposed to the German batteries, so I wriggled low down in my seat and tucked my arm well under cover for quite five minutes. But you couldn't see anything that way, so I popped up again and presently forgot all about my valuable arm in the sheer excitement of the rush through the danger zone. Our car was low on the ground; still, it was high enough and big enough to serve as a mark for the German guns and it fairly gave them the range of the road. But though the guns had been pounding away before we started, they ceased firing as we went through. That, however, was sheer luck. And presently it was brought home to me that we were not the only persons involved in the risk of this joyous adventure. Just outside the bombarded hamlet ahead of us we were stopped by some Belgian [? French] soldiers hidden in the cover of a ditch by the roadside, which if it was not a trench might very easily have been one. They were talking in whispers for fear of being overheard by the Germans, who must have been at least a mile off, across the fields on the other side of the river. A mile seemed a pretty safe distance; but Mr. L. said it wouldn't help us much, considering that the range of their guns was twenty-four miles. The soldiers told us we couldn't possibly get through to Zele. That was true. The road was blocked--by the ruins of the hamlet--not twenty yards from where we were pulled up. We got out of the car; and while Mr. L. and the Belgian lady conversed with the soldiers, Mr. M. and I walked on to investigate the road. At the abrupt end of a short row of houses it stopped where it should have turned suddenly, and became a rubbish-heap lying in a waste place. Just at first I thought we must have gone out of our course somehow and missed the road to Zele. It was difficult to realize that this rubbish-heap lying in a waste place ever _had_ been a road. But for the shell of a house that stood next to it, the last of the row, and the piles of lath and plaster, and the shattered glass on the sidewalk and the blown dust everywhere, it might have passed for the ordinary no-thoroughfare of an abandoned brick-field.