I got back slowly, keeping the line by the burning cottages. The drive that followed will not easily be forgotten—at headlong speed through awkward lanes. Only once—we were running without lights—did a challenge stop us; but we chanced its being a friend, and only heard the stray shot after us, in the dark.
Some day I may be able to write the story of the "audacious chauffeur." He swept me thirty miles through the night with extraordinary nerve and skill. Only one of several daring runs.
There was no rest this last night. It was clear Brussels would be occupied in a few hours. In that event we were under promise to bring out a certain frightened mother and her babies. The event had seemed remote; but, like the tide on flat sands, while we watched the distant edge of the sea, it was already up, round, and behind us.
We were already all but cut off, since Brussels must now in a few hours cut the last of its communications.
Friday, Daylight.
Down the car went again at 3 a.m., while I tried to get some sleep. It seemed only a moment later that there was shouting in the village, and a rattle of wooden sabots passed under the window, running.
I looked out, under the cottage blind; and in a few minutes, through the grey early light, two or three mounted, grey-shimmering Lancers walked their horses down the street. It seemed as if they were provoking the cottagers to fire at them. More probably they were perfectly confident in the general evacuation of this district. There were more, the women told me later, riding past outside the cottages.
It was an undignified time of waiting, with no chance of a fight. Nothing to do but dress, smoke, and get the papers ready in case they came in. The terrible "game" is so real, even for the non-fighter, that their passing, and the quiet of the empty street that followed, brought more relief than one cares usually to confess to.
Bruges, Friday noon.
It was no use trying to sleep there, with the nervous chatter beginning of the women clustered under the windows, and with the chance of "more" coming. The loan of a captured Uhlan horse, a trophy which the village was now anxious to dispense with, and another lift from a car returning for wounded, took me down again in the fields to the east of Brussels.