My captain returned to The Hague the next morning, bringing his report. He had seen the horror with his own eyes. More: with the care of a true officer he had made a map of the course taken by the air-ship in its flight over the city. That map showed beyond a doubt that the aim of the marauder was to destroy the principal hospital, the hotel where the Belgian Ministers lived, and the palace in which the King and Queen with their children were sleeping. I cabled the facts to Washington at once, and sent the map with a fuller report the next day. I felt deeply (and ventured to express my feeling) that the United States could, and ought to, protest against this clear violation of the law of nations--this glaring manifestation of a spirit which was going to make this war the most cruel and atrocious known to history. The foreboding of a return to barbarism has been fulfilled, alas, only too abominably! In every step of that downward path Germany has led the way, by the perfection of her scientific methods applied to a devilish purpose. Take, for example, the use of poisonous gas in warfare. This was an ancient weapon, employed long before the beginning of the Christian era. It had been abandoned by civilized nations, and was prohibited by one of the Hague conventions, for a period of five years. But that period having expired, and the convention being only a "scrap of paper," Germany revived the ancient deviltry in a more scientific form. On April 22, 1915, she sent the yellow clouds of death rolling down upon the trenches of Ypres, where the British defended the last city of outraged Belgium. The suffocating horrors of that hellish method of attack are beyond description. The fame of this achievement of spectacled barbarism belongs to the learned servants of the predatory Potsdam gang. But we cannot blame the Allies if they were forced reluctantly to take up the same weapon in self-defense. IV The real character and the inhuman effect of the German invasion were brought home to us, and made painfully clear to our eyes and our hearts, by the amazing tragic spectacle of the flood of refugees pouring out of Belgium. It began slowly. When the quaint frontier town of Vise, surrounded by its goose-farms, was attacked and set on fire on August 4, there were many families from the neighborhood who fled to Holland. When Liege was captured on the 7th after a brave defense, and its last fort fell on the 15th, there were more fugitives. When Brussels was occupied without resistance on the 20th there were still more. As the invasion spread westward and southward, engulfing city after city in widening waves of blood, the tide of terror and flight rose steadily. It reached its high-water mark when Antwerp, after the Germans had pounded its outer and inner circle of forts for nine days, was bombarded on October 7 and captured on the 18th.