"I think it impracticable. Liège only held out until the new siege howitzers arrived. Namur fell at once. Why should we expect Antwerp to be impregnable?" The navy deemed the army pessimistic, but, exactly a month later, the Lieutenant-Commander remembered that conversation, and remarked to a friend that about the middle of September he took to Ostend "a chap on the Staff who seemed to know a bit." It is now a matter of historical fact when Von Kluck and Sir John French began their famous race to the north, the Belgian army only escaped from Antwerp by the skin of its teeth. The city itself was occupied by the Germans on October 9th, Bruges was entered on the 13th, Von Bessler's army reached the coast on the 15th, and the British and Belgians were attacked on the line of the Yser next day. Thus, fate decreed that Dalroy should witness the beginning and the end of Germany's shameless outrage on a peaceful and peace-loving country. On August 2nd, 1914, King Albert ruled over the most prosperous and contented small kingdom in Europe. Within eleven weeks he had become, as Emile Cammaerts finely puts it, "lord of a hundred fields and a few spires." Though Dalroy should live far beyond the alloted span of man's life, he will never forget the strain, the misery, the sheer hopelessness of the second month he spent in Belgium. The climax came when he found himself literally overwhelmed by the host of refugees, wounded men, and scattered military units which sought succour in, and, as the iron ring of _Kultur_ drew close, transport from Ostend. With the retreat of the Belgian army towards Dunkirk, and the return to England of such portion of the ill-fated Naval Division as was not interned in Holland, his military duties ceased. In his own and the country's interests he ought to have made certain of a berth on the last passenger steamer to leave Ostend for England. He, at least, could have done so, though there were sixty thousand frenzied people crowding the quays, and hundreds, if not thousands, of comparatively wealthy men offering fabulous sums for the use of any type of vessel which would take them and their families to safety.