"About half an hour away," he answers.
I listen dreamily. Holland sounds very near. I wonder what I am going to do. Am I going to stay and see the Germans enter? But maybe they will never enter. The unexpected will happen. We shall be saved at the eleventh hour. It is impossible that Antwerp can fall.
"They will be shelling the town before twenty-four hours," says one young man, and he calls for another drink. When he has had it he says he wishes he hadn't.
"They will never shell the town," says a choleric old Englishman. And he adds in the best English manner, "It could never be permitted!"
Outside, the day dies down.
The sound of cannon has entirely ceased.
One can hear nothing now, nothing at all, but the loud and shrill cries of the newsboys and women selling Le Matin d'Anvers and Le Métropole in the streets.
A strange hushed silence hangs over the besieged city, and through the silence the clocks strike six, and almost immediately the maître d'hôtel comes along and informs us that we ought to come in to dinner soon, as to-day the lights must go out at nightfall!
But I go into the streets instead.
It seems to me that the population of Antwerp has suddenly turned into peasants.