So the military governor, as we observed next morning in a proclamation posted on the blank wall across the street, informing the inhabitants that they "apparently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the situation," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred thousand francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and not stir abroad before seven next morning. Another poster warned people that two English aviators had been obliged to come down within the city, that they were still at large, and that any one who hid them or helped them escape would be punished with death, in addition to which the commune would be punished, too.
It was through black and silent streets, therefore, that our troop was led from the hotel in which we were lodged to one in which we dined. Here everything was warm and light and cheerful enough. Boyish lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the German fashion, were telling each other their adventures, and here and there were older officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of some old friend. The bread was black and hard, but the other food as usual in France, with wine plenty and cheap, and even some of the round-shelled, coppery oysters—captured somehow, in spite of blockades and bombardments—just up from Ostend. It was bedtime when we emerged into the black streets again, to discover, with something like surprise, a sky full of stars and a pale new moon.
The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed—a sort of loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a pause for breath. You can imagine _that cosmopolitan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; at noon inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people coming home from church, the German guard changing, and the German band playing in the central square; at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach. Next day Brussels—out to Waterloo, in a cloud of dust—the Congo Museum—the King's palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard like the tall King Leopold's leading these vandals through it, and looking unutterable things—a word with the civil governor, here—a charming lunch at a barracks, there—in short, a wild flight behind the man with the precious "Ausweis."
We saw and sometimes met a good many German officers in a rather familiar way. Many of the younger men reminded one of our university men at home; several of the older men resembled their well-set-up English cousins. This seemed particularly true of the navy, which has acquired a type—lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of humor—entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar. Particularly interesting were those who, called back 'into uniform from responsible positions in civil life, were attacking, as if building for all time, the appallingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a government for a complex modern state, and winning the tolerance, if not the co-operation, of a conquered people confident that their subjection was but for the day.
Our progress everywhere was down a continuous aisle of heel-clickings and salutes. Sometimes, when we had to pass through three rows of passport examiners between platform and gate, these formalities seemed rather excessive. In the grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels and loops of sausages—"all made by the regiment"—and were just entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his superior officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it is every German subordinate's duty to do, bellowed out his "Meldung"—who and what the men in his room were, and that they were going to have meat and noodle soup for dinner.
No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be taught, let alone achieve of his own free will, the utter self-forgetfulness with which this vast creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or rather exploded: "Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche-desten-Landwehr- Regiments! Belegt-mit-einem-Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann! Wir essen heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch! Zu Befehl!"
He had stepped down a century and a half from the grenadiers of the Great Frederic, and even our hosts may have smiled. It was different with the soldiers' salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we saw repeated scores of times a day. Whatever men might be doing, however awkward or inconvenient it might be, whether any one saw them or not, they stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue coats and stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides. If they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget. It is a look of seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious devotion, not to the individual, but to the idea for which he stands. I saw a soldier half-dressed, through a barracks window under which we passed, sending after his officer, who did not even see him, that same look, the look of a man who has just volunteered to charge the enemy's trench, or who sees nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God and nothing else in the world!
One seemed to see the soul of Germany, at least of this "great time," in these men's eyes. The Belgian soul we did not see much of, but there came glimpses of it now and then.
In Antwerp we stopped in a little café for a cup of chocolate. It was a raw, cheerless morning, with occasional snowflakes whipping by on the damp north wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the room that used to be full of smoke and talk there were only empty tables, and you could see your breath.
A man was scrubbing behind the bar, and a pale girl in black came out from behind the cashier's counter to make our chocolate. It was good chocolate, as Antwerp chocolate is likely to be, and as we were getting ready to go out again I asked her how things were. She glanced around the room and answered that they used to have a good business here, but the good times were gone—"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment. She answered politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now— she had left on the second day, when the building across the way was smashed, and walking, catching rides, stumbling along with the other thousands, had got into Holland. As to why the city fell so quickly— she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and murmured that there were things people did not know, if they did they did not talk about them.