At La Panne, which I reached at noon on a little steam railway running from Furnes, I had luncheon with several Belgian soldiers and a Belgian in civilian clothes, who told me I would see all the fighting I was looking for at Nieuport, just beyond. The civilian, a tall youth with a blond beard, volunteered to show me the way to the beach, the shortest route, and ended by going all the way. He told me he was recovering from an "attack of Congo," which I take to be an intermittent fever. He had just been mustered out of the civic guard and was waiting for a uniform to join the army. He had the afternoon free and his Belgian sense of hospitality impelled him to see that the stranger was properly looked after. For several miles along the wide, flat beach, which stretches unobstructed as far as Ostend, except for the piers at Nieuport-les-Bains and Westende, there were Belgian soldiers bathing in the shallow water. Some of them, cavalrymen, were riding naked into the deeper water, and this, mind you, was late October. They were even playing jokes on one another, and did not seem to be paying any attention to the fifteen English and French cruisers and gunboats which were standing off the shore almost opposite them, keeping up a steady stream of fire obliquely along the beach at the sand dunes just beyond the pier at Nieuport-les-Bains. In these dunes, _five_ miles away, big German guns were hidden. [Sidenote: Fishermen unconcerned.] Farther on, and even right up to the pier at Nieuport, we passed, along the beach behind the shrimp fishermen, who seemed even less interested in the novel fight on land and sea. The barelegged men and women were as industriously taking advantage of the low-tide as if nothing at all were happening. The French and English warships were directly opposite them, and, by this time, they were drawing the German fire. German shells, probably from siege guns, were plumping down into the water all around them only a couple of miles off-shore, but, though the shrimpers looked up occasionally when the explosion of a shell fairly shook the face of the ocean, their attention would be directed again to their work before the column of water raised by the shell had had time to fall again. The shelling kept up about an hour, but none of the warships was struck. They kept moving at full-speed in an uneven line, making it impossible to get their range. [Sidenote: A panorama of battle.] [Sidenote: Germans try to cross the Yser.]