As a result there has grown up in me an extraordinary affection for him. Greater even than my admiration of his careless courage is my liking for the man. For all his manhood he has so much of the child in him; he is such a chatterbox and so full of laughter, and never are his laugh and badinage so quick as when he has the sternest work on hand. Unshaven, mud-bespattered, hungry, so tired that he can hardly walk or lift his rifle to his shoulder, he will bear himself with a gallant gayety which, I think, is quite his own and is altogether fascinating. As time goes on perhaps it will be the faces of the dead and wounded that will live most clearly in the memory, but at present the pictures of the Belgian soldier which stand out sharpest are less lugubrious and more commonplace. I walked one day back toward Antwerp, along that awful road which ran by Contich and Waerloos to Waelhem. Daily along that road the German shells fell nearer to the city, so that whenever one went out to the place that he had visited yesterday he was likely to find himself disagreeably surprised. One day I found myself, (I would not have been there had I known it,) perhaps a mile inside the range of the enemy's guns. A Red Cross car had dropped me and picked up wounded men instead, and there was nothing for it but to walk back along the road. Along the road from the foremost trenches came a dozen Belgian soldiers, just relieved after twenty-four hours of what it is difficult to describe otherwise than as hell. Muddied from head to heel, they could hardly drag their feet along, and, glad of any company, I fell in and walked with the last straggler of the little band, while the shrapnel with its long-drawn scream--whew-ew-ew-ew-bang!--broke on either side of us. At every whew-ew-ew-ew which came too near I dived for cover. If there was no friendly wall or vehicle or tree trunk at hand the ditch beside the road was always there. And every time I dived my companion stood in the middle of the road and shook with laughter--not unkindly, but in the utmost friendliness and good humor--waiting till I rejoined him and we resumed our walk. A little man, shockingly bedraggled, worn out almost to the point of collapse, utterly indifferent to his own danger, and taking a huge, childlike delight in my care for my personal safety, the picture of him as he stood and laughed all alone in the bare road amid the bursting shells seems to me curiously typical of the whole Belgian Army.