Then we discovered fifty German motor cyclists, in grey uniforms, and flat caps, flying smoothly along the side path in one long grey line. Their accoutrements looked perfect and trim, their general appearance was strikingly smart, natty, and workmanlike in the extreme. Just before they reached us Jean got down and walked on foot along the road at the edge of the side path where they were riding. And as they passed quite near him Jean turned his glance towards me and gave me an enormous wink. I don't know whether that was Jean's sense of humour. I always forgot afterwards to ask him what it meant. I only know that it had a peculiarly cheering effect on me to see that great black eye winking and then turning itself with a quiet, careless gaze on the faces of the fifty German cyclists. They passed without doing more than casting a look at us, and were lost to sight in a moment flashing onwards with tremendous speed towards Enghien. We were now on the brow of a hill, and as we reached it, and began to descend, we were confronted with a spectacle that fairly took away my breath. The long white road before us was literally lined with Germans. CHAPTER XV FACE TO FACE WITH THE HUNS Yes, there they were! And when I found myself face to face with those five hundred advancing Germans, about two kilometres out of Enghien, I quite believed I was about to lose my chance of getting to Brussels and of seeing the man I was so anxious to see. Little did I dream at that moment, out there on the sunny Brabant hillside, seated in the old voiture, with that long, never-ending line of Germans filling the tree-lined white dusty highway far and wide with their infantry and artillery, their cannon, and the prancing horses of their officers, and their gleaming blue and scarlet uniforms, and glittering appointments, that it was not I who was going to be taken prisoner by "les Allemands" that brilliant Saturday afternoon, but Max of Brussels himself. Up and down the long steep white road to Brussels the Germans halted, shouting in stentorian voices that we were to do likewise. Our driver quickly brought his two bony horses to a standstill, and in the open carriage with me our queer haphazard party sat as if turned to stone. The Red Cross Belgian lady had already hidden her Red Cross in her stocking, so that the Germans, if we met them, should not seize her and oblige: her to perform Red Cross duties in their hated service. The guttural voice of an erect old blue-and-scarlet German colonel fell on my ears like a bad dream, as he brought his big prancing grey horse alongside our driver and demanded roughly what we were doing there, while in the same bad dream, as I sat there in my corner of the voiture, I watched the expressions written all over those hundreds of fierce, fair, arrogant faces, staring at us from every direction.