There were two business men in our coupe going to France, an elderly Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, with black goggles and umbrella, hoping to get through to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright, sweet-faced little Englishwoman, in nurse's dark-blue uniform and bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her sister's convent had been turned into a hospital. She told about her little east-coast town as we crossed the sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great empty station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, found a few cars getting away, so to speak, of their own accord. The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly past; then Bruges, with a wounded soldier leaning on the shoulders of two companions; then Ghent. There was a great crowd about the station--men thrown out of work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes--the town just recovering from the panic of that afternoon. Flags had been hauled down--the American consul was even asked if he didn't think it would be safer to take down his flag--some of the civic guards, fearing they would be shot on sight if the Germans saw them in uniform, tore off their coats and threw them in the canal. Others threw in cartridges, thousands of gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and everybody watched the church tower for the red flag which would signal that firing was about to begin. Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested stoutly because its mail edition had been refused at the station: It is not alone on the field of battle that one must be brave. For us civilians real courage consists in doing our ordinary duty up to the last. In Limburg postmen made their rounds while Prussians inundated the region, and peasants went right along with their sowing while down the road troops were falling back from the firing-line. Let us think of our sons sleeping forever down there in the trenches of Haelen and Tirlemont and Aerschot; of those brave artillerymen who, for twenty days, have been waiting in the forts at Liege the help so many times promised from the allies; of our lancers charging into mitrailleuse-fire as if they were in a tournament; let us remember that our heroic little infantrymen, crouched behind a hedge or in a trench, keeping up their fire for ten hours running until their ammunition was exhausted, and forced at last to retire, wounded and worn out, without a chief to take orders from, have had no other thought than that of finding some burgomaster or commissioner of police, in order not to be taken for deserters. Let us think a little of all these brave men and be worthy of them.