The highways were black with the panting crowds: ladies of fashion, white-haired men and women, wounded soldiers, priests old and young, nuns, mothers, daughters, children. So it was described by one who saw it. More than a quarter of a million of inhabitants left Antwerp in one day. The world has never before seen such an emptying of a great city. “Some day,” Mr. Buchan ends, “when its imagination has grown quicker, it will find the essence of war not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in the pale women dragging their pitiful belongings through the Belgian fields in the raw October night.” If anything could further quicken the world’s imagination it would be this picture. Rubens devised the famous “pomps” for the entry of Ferdinand of Austria. The German entry had no Rubens. But this miserable pomp, this “pitiful exodus,” has found its realistic Rubens in Raemaekers. HERBERT WARREN. [Illustration] _“Death the Friend”_ When the white horse rode out to war with the clever, handsome mountebank in the shining armor astride it (ignore for the moment the duller fact of an anxious, field-gray man in a Benz limousine) the demigod made, let us admit it, a brave show. ’Tis credibly reported that in his company rode his august familiar, “our old God” in a new mood and a brand new uniform, “wearing,” in fact, in the words of a dithyrambic Teuton, “the Death’s Head cap of the German Hussars and carrying a white banner.” What that Other may be assumed to have made of Dixmude, Termonde, and the ineffable rest of it is for the curious to conjecture: as also at what exact stage of the swift journeyings back and forth of the tired white horse there came into a mind fed on rich, fat phrases and meaty metaphors, and the flattery of astute, strong men and the dazzling reflections of the imperial cheval glass, the first doubt as to whether the high approval of that Other were indeed an objective reality, or merely a figment of the imagination of an overwrought overman. In any case, there must soon have dawned an aching wonder as to how the devil the banner could be _white_. And when was it that in place of that Other Rider in the hussar’s cap there seemed to be something queer and sinister astride behind him on his battle-weary steed? Was it then that he began to whistle so vigorously (_vide_ German Press _passim_) to keep up his spirits? And will there come a time (has it already come?) when that caressing touch on the shoulder will seem indeed the caress of a friend, and that gaunt index point to the only peace he will ever know? JOSEPH THORP. [Illustration] _A Higher Pile_ Full half a million men, yet not enough To break this township on a winding stream; More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuff That built a nation’s manhood may redeem The Highest’s hopes and fructify his dream.