Heart-breaking it is, as well as appalling, to see those distracted timepieces, and their ignorance of the fatal hour. Half-past one! And the clocks point pathetically to eleven, or eight, or five. Inside the great dim restaurant a pretence of lunch is going on between the little handful of people left. Everybody sits at one table, the chauffeur, Henri, the refugees from Lierre, their maidservant, Jeanette, the proprietor, and his old sister, and his two little grandchildren, and their father, the porter, and a couple of very ugly old Belgians, who seem to belong to nobody in particular, and have sprung from nobody knows where. We have some stewed meat with potatoes, a rough, ill-cooked dish. This is the first bad meal I have had in Antwerp. But what seems extraordinary to me, is that there should be any meal at all! As we sit round the table in the darkness of that lurid noontide, the dead city outside looks in through the broken windows, and there comes over us all a tension so great that nobody can utter a word. We are all thinking the same thing. We are thinking with our dull, addled, clouded brains that the Germans will be here at any minute. And then suddenly the waiter cries out in a loud voice from across the restaurant: "_LES ALLEMANDS!_" We all spring to our feet. We stand for a moment petrified. Through the great uncurtained windows of the hotel we see one grey figure, and then another, walking along the side-path up the Avenue de Commerce. "They have come!" says everyone. After a moment's hesitation M. Claude, the proprietor, and his old sister, move out into the street, and mechanically I, and all the others follow as if afraid to be left alone within. CHAPTER XXXVIII "MY SON!" And now through the livid sunless silences of the deserted city, still reeking horribly of powder, shrapnel, smoke and burning petroleum, the Germans are coming down the Avenues to enter into possession. Here they come, a long grey line of foot-soldiers and mounted men, all with pink roses or carnations in their grey tunics. Suddenly, a long, lidded, baker's cart dashes across the road at a desperate rate, wheeled by a poor old Belgian, whose face is so wild, that I whisper as she passes close to me: "Is somebody ill in your cart?" Without stopping, without looking even, her haggard eyes full of despair, she mutters: "_Dead!_ My son! He was a soldat." Then she hurries on, at a run now, to find a spot where she can hide or bury her beloved before the Germans are all over the city. CHAPTER XXXIX THE RECEPTION A singular change now comes over the silent, deserted city. First, a few stray Belgians shew on the side-paths. Then more appear, and more still, and as the procession of the Germans comes onwards through the town I discover little groups of men and women sprung out of the very earth it seems to me.