The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked their doors and fled. And the cannon rumbling along the eastern horizon as they had rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer line of forts and within striking distance of the town. That night, an hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels. I went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs, and looked out. It was a moonlight night, clear and cold, and there along the Quai St. Michael, at the end of the street, was an army in retreat. They were Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired horses, artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, drowsing on their lurching caissons; the patient little foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their shoulders, scuffling along in their heavy overcoats. In the dark shadow of the tall old houses a few people came out and stood there watching silently, and, as one felt, in a sort of despair. All night long men were marching by--and in London they were still reading that it was but a "demonstration" the Germans were engaged in-- down the quay and across the pontoon bridge--the only way over the Scheldt--over to the Tete-de-Flandres and the road to Ghent. They were strung along the street next morning, boots mud-covered, mud-stained, intrenching shovels hanging to their belts, faces unshaven for weeks, just as they had come from the trenches; yet still patient and cheerful, with that unshakable Flemish good cheer. Perhaps, after all, it was not a retreat; they might be swinging round to the south and St. Nicholas to attack the German flank...