Almost immediately there was a tremendous explosion, which we scarcely heeded, so intent were we on his escape. For what seemed hours, though it was probably not more than a few moments, we followed his flight amid a storm of attack that seemed to miss him at times only by a hair’s breadth. In a villa facing ours dwelt a young American widow, who, with her two sons, as little clothed as we, was also watching the combat. One of the boys, as reckless of risk as he was indifferent to his attire, had crawled from a window, and stood, bare-footed, in pyjamas, on the roof cornice in great danger of being struck by falling bits of shell. The widow, wrought to uncontrollable excitement, called out as though the daring flyer could hear her: “For Heaven’s sake hurry!—_Fly!_—Oh, they will bring you down!—God have mercy on him! Spare him! Spare him!” Her cries came thinly to us, through the thunderous din, and, though she and we all laughed over it later, at that moment of tension nothing impressed us as extraordinary or comic. Every sense was centred on that rising form, until it finally disappeared in the mist of higher ether. Had he been brought down we should have all felt it as a personal tragedy; for, although at that time America was still comfortably neutral, we who had witnessed Belgium’s martyrdom were little in sympathy with our country’s attitude. But this took place earlier; before the spring of 1917 the Machiavellian intelligence ruling us is supposed to have devised a means whereby it hoped to check aerial assaults upon these cherished perils-to-unprotected-towns. Although the trick was beyond all things diabolical, many in Brussels, taught by experience the inhumanity of Prussian war-methods, believed it was done with deliberate intention to terrify the inhabitants into opposing Allied aerial attack. As the Zeppelin, unfortunately, was absent from its shed when a well-directed bomb was dropped on it during this attack, another attempt to destroy it was made later. During the latter raid several shrapnel shells tore with direful effect through the city’s crowded streets. Many ghastly details reached us, but one account, given by an eye-witness, will serve to illustrate the vileness of a scheme which, if indeed intentional, can only be equalled by the sinking of the _Lusitania_ and that shooting of the French wounded, openly recorded in the German papers, under the heading: “A day of honour for our troops”! One of the shells, in its mad career through the city, struck a brewer’s wagon, killing the driver, and the oxen which drew it, and severely wounded a second man. A physician in the vicinity hastened to the spot; and with those who gathered about the scene of butchery came two German officers who appeared already prepared for the event.