Oh, these Belgians are brave and they know how to obey, which may be the very secret of their greatness. It is glorious to see the respect with which even grown men accept the advice of their aged parents, for at the moment of peril to their honor and their country when the old father had said to his son, "My boy, it is time to lay down the hoe and take up the sword," he had answered, simply, "_Oui, mon père_," while the women brought out the sword and buckled it on with a tearless Godspeed. That is the way the Belgians went to war and that is the way they will sustain themselves to the glorious end. _October 5th, Monday._ To-day, two months after that horrible battle of Sartilmont, we found a Belgian soldier's cap lying in the middle of the path in the woods. It seemed like a human thing and stirred me to the profoundest depths. I never thought that clothes could take on life and a personality all alone, but they do. Has its owner been in hiding all these weeks or is he lying yet unburied among the friendly trees? In these places where Death has walked so boldly one feels his accompanying presence at every step. _October 8th, Thursday._ Monsieur B., a man of seventy years (Madame X.'s brother-in-law), was taken as hostage yesterday at Spa. Fortunately for him, he was allowed to sleep in the hotel, but can you imagine what the anxiety of those twenty-four hours was? Every voice in the street, every foot-step in the corridor--! From the top of the mountain all day a continual booming was heard, distantly transmitted through the air. It was so incessant and with such vivacity, one could easily imagine two armies all mixed up into one. The Red Cross trains bear witness to tremendous battles somewhere--but where? We hardly know how to contain ourselves in this absolute ignorance of what is happening in the world. We rush upon and tear to bits, like beasts of prey, the least little piece of news that comes straggling within reach and if, by chance, someone comes into the court, it is enough for all the family, including the servants, to rush to the windows in excitement. The soldiers who are in the garage had the delicate idea of killing a cow therein, which they did, and dismantled the animal then and there. The next day they dressed themselves in Belgian uniforms, stripped from the dead, and had themselves photographed before the château. We noticed their laughing and pointing to the attic windows of the house, and we finally discovered that they had festooned strings of sausages, of their own recent make, from the window sills, to ripen.