A few gloomy citizens, an occasional housewife, small boys and girls in neat cheap clothes and noisy wooden shoes stalked across the open square before the cathedral. A squad of German soldiers tramped by on their way to the Kommandantur in the Stadthuis. Soon mass was over, and a flood of grave, black-clad figures filled the square and melted away into the by-streets. A worn black flag fluttered from a pole on the very top of the church.
“Madame, what is the black flag on your cathedral?” I asked, sipping black coffee.
“It was once white, that flag, monsieur.”
“But, madame! it is coal black.”
“Monsieur, it is the flag which we of Diest hoisted when the Germans came. Aerschot, Louvain, Schaffen—they were destroyed by the Germans. Diest,” she shrugged her shoulders, “Diest is as you see it.”
Across the Grand’ Place, behind the gates of a porte cochère belonging to a rival inn, I found my chauffeur, Alexis, busy with the broken motor.
“Monsieur, this is the cylinder which does not march,” he called loudly, his tricky eyes eager for praise and his mouth smiling blandly behind his curved moustaches. “More oil!” he ordered imperiously from the bent old innkeeper who stood, cap in hand, watching; and while the man shuffled off with a wash-bowl, Alexis loudly continued to explain to me the difficulty. “I am mechanician as well as chauffeur, monsieur,” he declaimed, although I was well aware of the fact. “I will arrange everything. In an hour all is arranged.”
A side glance gave me the clue to Alexis’s authoritative tone. The young wife of the innkeeper, a heavy flaxen-haired Flemish woman, watched smiling from the open door. Alexis’s gestures and mouthings were for her.
In the rafters over the motor-car I heard soft cheeping, and a swallow slid from a mud cup fixed to one of the timbers and stole out into the morning sunshine. There were other earthen cups, lined no doubt with feathers, in the shadow above us: three or four cups brimming with swallow babies. One after another the gray-blue mothers came and went, circling fearlessly over us, engaged in the sensible business of filling the world with swallows.
“In an hour, monsieur, all is arranged,” Alexis repeated, trying to get rid of me. So I determined to stay.