At the words "Give it up or I fire," frantically shouted, I thought it time to interfere. I had two bayonets at once thrust against my chest.
"Where do you wish to be taken, friend?" He growled the name of some village on the French frontier. The position grew clearer. He was one of the "disbanded" escaping to his home. There were many, all about us, but in civilian clothes.
"I will take you, in uniform, to any place you choose at the front; but no law compels me to carry fugitives." ("Fuyards" is much stronger.) "Get into clothes like mine, and I'll drop you at any (sacré) hiding-hole that suits you."
The effect on the crowd was electric. The soldiers faded; and we left, after a proper interval, to let the crowd cool down.
Not a quarter of a mile to the west of Ghent, where the roads were spotted with carts of escaping households, an enormous Franciscan monk blocked the road, with uplifted cross. "Stop, and take us, in the name of the Virgin." He was supporting two wounded soldiers. It appeared that, in foolish panic, all the private hospitals had been emptied. "Sauve qui peut" was the word. The sick and wounded soldiers, many from Liége, dressed in any odd civilian clothes, were being turned out on to the roads to find their way to remote homes.
We bundled them in; took them to the nearest railway line; flagged a train at a level crossing, and sent them off, with breathless blessings from the railway window. But the roads were full of them: men limping, men almost crawling, without money, and with only the dangerous soldier's "pass" to carry them to their villages, already held by the enemy.
For many hours we had given up our purpose of localising the column, and travel backwards and forwards over the province, scattering them far and wide in remote villages, either to their wives, or often in the care of kindly women, who would pretend to be their wives or mothers, in safer places. The strange panic feeling had now spread wide. Everywhere were the little swarms of subdued people, with puzzled, sullen faces, seen in forlorn villages. The cottages were emptying, shop-windows being hurriedly covered, and signs hastily painted out.
The Civil Guard, disbanded, were being confusedly shoved into civilian dress by their terror-stricken wives and daughters.
Occasionally I had to sit and make explanatory conversations in the market places to knots of depressed Flemish civic fathers, who would otherwise have made even more difficulty about our frequent journeyings. "Where are the English?" "Who has betrayed us?" "Why have we been kept in the dark, and now find ourselves helpless?"—all of them unanswerable questions.
It became peculiarly difficult to keep up such talk, when, later in the day, every quarter-hour would come a rush of clogs down the street, and the roar of "They're coming!" The elders melted miraculously, and I was left in the empty street facing a row of half-filled beer glasses, and the thought that it might be true this time.