It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot stir from your tracks, and meanwhile "Boom… Tzee-ee-ee-ee !"—is this one meant for you?
Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and people with white bundles on their backs went stumbling by toward the river and the bridge. Motors came honking down from the inner streets, and the quay, which had begun to clear by this time, was again jammed. I threw on some clothes, hurried to the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, lighting up the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast-furnace, and a few moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire.
Although we could hear the wail of shells flying across their wide parabola both into the town and out from the first ring of forts, few burst in our part of the city that night, and we walked up as far as the cathedral without seeing anything but black and silent streets. Every one in the hotel was up and dressed by this time. Some were for leaving at once; one family, piloted by the comfortable Belgian servants—far cooler than any one else—went to the cellar, some gathered about the grate in the writing-room to watch the night out; the rest of us went back to bed.
There wasn't much sleep for any one that night. The bombardment kept on until morning, lulled slightly, as if the enemy might be taking breakfast, then it continued into the, next day. And now the city—a busy city of nearly four hundred thousand people—emptied itself in earnest. Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows, dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and the bridge. They poured into coal barges, filling the yawning black holes as Africans used to fill slave-ships, into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading down the river and southwestward toward Ostend.
One thought with a shudder of what would happen if the Germans dropped a few of their shells into that helpless mob, and it is only fair to remember that they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers were a part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the blue, was looking calmly down overhead. Nor did they touch the cathedral, and their agreement not to shell any of the buildings previously pointed out on a map delivered to them through the American Legation seemed to be observed.
Down through that mass of fugitives pushed a London motor-bus ambulance with several wounded British soldiers, one of them sitting upright, supporting with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound in a blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away. They had come in from the trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and pounded them with his big guns. I asked them how things were going, and they said not very well. They could only wait until the German aeroplanes had given the range and the trenches became too hot, then fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same game over again.
Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, driven by a Belgian soldier and in charge of a young British officer. It was his present duty to motor from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded. It wasn't a particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant firing, and frankly he wasn't keen about it. We talked for some time, every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that morning, and when he started out again I asked him to give me a lift to the edge of town.
Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and the deserted streets of the politer part of Antwerp, where, the night before, most of the shells had fallen. We went crackling over broken glass, past gaping cornices and holes in the pavement, five feet across and three feet deep, and once passed a house quietly burning away with none to so much as watch the fire. The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew near, then the tunnel passing under it, and we went through without pausing and on down the road to Malines. We were beyond the town now, bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, and, clinging there to the running-board with the October wind blowing quite through a thin flannel suit, it suddenly came over me that things had moved very fast in the last five minutes, and that all at once, in some unexpected fashion, all that elaborate barrier of laissez-passers, sauf-conduits, and so on, had been swept aside, and, quite as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, I was spinning out to that almost mythical "front."
Front, indeed! It was two fronts. There was an explosion just behind us, a hideous noise overhead, as if the whole zenith had somehow been ripped across like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a shell from the Belgian fort under which we had just passed went hurtling down long aisles of air—farther—farther—to end in a faint detonation miles away.
Out of sight in front of us, there was an answering thud, and— "Tzee-ee-ee-er-r-r-ong!"—a German shell had gone over us and burst behind the Belgian fort. Under this gigantic antiphony the motor-car raced along, curiously small and irrelevant on that empty country road.