Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every German cavalryman was an Uhlan, according to popular conception. These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the accounts that one read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted youth, with horses fresh and a trooper’s zest in the first flush of war, returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes. A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old with toil. “_Les Anglais!_” she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist toward the Germans. When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman. But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly entrenching back of Louvain, or flag-decked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with the true _shipperke_ spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which was about to burst in a flood. It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where every one learns a single language, English, that she and her ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated country to people who speak French and to French civilisation, should never have learned to express themselves in any but their own tongue--singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular education! She would save the lance heads and garner every grain of wheat; she economised in all but racial animosity. This racial stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it keeps Europe powerful in jealous competition of race with race. The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans to come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the Germans were “out there.” Across the fields one saw nothing on that still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first enemy aeroplane I had seen in war. For the last two days the German patrols had ceased to come. Liége, we knew, had fallen. Looking at the map, we prayed that Namur would hold.