The Belgian Army was active this morning. Already at dawn as I passed out of Antwerp through the wire entanglements and small inundations about the military camps, they were on the move for another attack. The guns were in action to the south of us. The country, in the line of Ghent, is now free. It was possible to travel almost to the French frontier before the alarm of Uhlans began. But the villages, populous and filled with panic last week, are now half deserted and melancholy. The refugees pour aimlessly to the coast and back again, according to the rumours. The railways run, advancing and retreating, according to the movements of the enemy. In the morning trains may run straight, in the evening make a cautious loop. A curious situation, significant of the double occupation of the "open" territory. I wished to clear up some of the mystery enveloping the northern end of the French frontier. I therefore passed through Ghent westward. Last week I left a German cavalry column disappearing into the silence of "no official news" into the neighbourhood of Courtrai. This afternoon I met news of them, or their like, returning in the same quarter, as I made a hurried run to the border. It was near Ypres that the peasants met us with warnings "The Germans have been sighted, and are expected here." From a safe retreat, in a wood on rising ground, we watched a small line of German wagons, probably of wounded, winding into and out at the other end of the short village street. It was accompanied and followed by cavalry and a few cars. It has been heartening to see any Germans facing in the right direction, before I descended once again upon Ostend. CHAPTER VIII Paris and the Trenches The ten days of the great conflict across France were now ended. The military machine, the most powerful that the world has seen, had swept past us across the silence of the frontier. Perfectly prepared beyond all anticipation, and driven by the utmost forces of military despotic tradition, it had achieved a performance remarkable in the history of wars. But the machine had been met, and though we did not yet know it, the momentum of its hammer-blow had been exhausted, by a defensive retreat which will rank as unsurpassed not only in military history but in the record of the greatest feats of human endurance, of the supreme conquests of the spirit of man over the machinery of man's invention.