Hideous night, pierced with flame, serried with a rocket's gleaming train, weird with bursting bombs that light the glistening fields a grayish green; awful night, shaking to the booming of heavy guns, blotched with the red of splitting shells, quivering insanely to a machine gun's steady beat; night of death, with the wounded turning white, waiting for the hours just before the dawn when the firing stops and their comrades may be spared to carry them back; with the field of the soaked dead, a nightmare of lumpy things, seen hellishly in the rocket's glow. But in the trenches--all along the big ditch from the dunes of Flanders to the foothills of the Vosges--it is the same night and day; and bullets are whistling and harmonicas are playing. I heard them both at Arras and Labasse. VIII CAPTURED BELGIUM AND ITS GOVERNOR GENERAL "The Governor General will receive you at four," said Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, explaining things; "I shall accompany you." As we had just come up from the front around Lille, the only clothes we had were those on our backs; and to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's officer's boots and my puttees, the mud of the trenches still clung in yellow cakes. Hardly the most proper clothes in which to meet King Albert's successor; but in field gray we had to go. Through the busy streets, up the long hill, to the Government buildings, we skirted the edge of that rectangle of stone buildings where Belgian officials used to conduct Belgian affairs. At the corner we turned, passing up the Rue de la Loi, where King Albert's palace frowns down upon two black and white striped Prussian sentry boxes, and then entered the Belgian War Ministry building. A German private ushered us up a flight of marble stairs to an antechamber, where we waited, while an adjutant disappeared through a pretentious white double door, to tell His Excellency that we had come. I noticed two marble busts in that antechamber, white busts on pedestals in opposite corners--the King and Queen of Belgium, and I wondered if they ever visited this city again, would it be an official visit, the guests of another nation, or a home-coming.