Thanks to the kindly General, I got a lift in a motor car, and was taken straight to the Hotel Terminus. I had eaten nothing since the morning. But the sleepy hotel night-porter told me it was impossible to get anything at that hour; everything was locked up; "_C'est la guerre!_" he said. Well, he was right; it was indeed the War, and I didn't feel that I had any call to complain or make a fuss, so I wearily took the lift up to my bedroom on the fourth floor, and speedily fell asleep. When I awoke, _it was three o'clock in the morning_, and a most terrific noise was going on. It was pitch dark, darker than any words can say, up there in my bedroom, for we were forbidden lights for fear of Zeppelins. All day long I had been travelling through Belgium, and all day long, it seemed to me, I had been turned out of one train into another, because "les Allemands" were on the line. So, when the noise awoke me, I knew at once it was those Germans that I had been running away from all day long, between Ostend and Bruges, and Bruges and Ghent, and Ghent and Boom, and Antwerp. I lay quite still. "They're come at last," I thought. "This is the real thing." Vaguely I wondered what to do. The roar of cannon was enormous, and it seemed to be just outside my window. And cracking and rapping through it, I heard the quick, incessant fire of musketry--crack, crack, crack, a beautiful, clean noise, like millions of forest boughs sharply breaking in strong men's hands. Vaguely I listened. And vaguely I tried to imagine how the Germans could have got inside Antwerp so quickly. Then vaguely I got out of bed. In the pitch blackness, so hot and stifling, I stood there trying to think, but my room seemed full of the roar of cannon, and I experienced a queer sensation as though I was losing consciousness in the sea, under the loud beat of waves. "I mustn't turn up the light," I said to myself, "or they will see where I am! That's the _one_ thing I mustn't do." Again I tried to think what to do, and then suddenly I found myself listening, with a sub-consciousness of immense and utter content, to the wild outcry of those cannons and muskets, and I felt as if I must listen, and listen, and listen, till I knew the sounds by heart. As for fear, there was none, not any at all, not a particle. Instead, there was something curiously akin to rapture. It seemed to me that the supreme satisfaction of having at last dropped clean away from all the make-believes of life, seized upon me, standing there in my nightgown in the pitch-black, airless room at Antwerp, a woman quite alone among strangers, with danger knocking at the gate of her world. Make-believe! Make-believe! All life up to this minute seemed nothing else but make-believe. For only Death seemed real, and only Death seemed glorious. All this took me about two minutes to think, and then I began to move about my room, stupidly, vaguely.