"We have managed to secure passages on a special military boat for Flushing that leaves at half-past eleven and of course we have got one for you. We have come back for you, but you are not here. Your car has arrived, so you will be all right, I hope. You have seen the bombardment through, bravo!"
I was glad they had got away. But for myself some absolutely irresistible force held me to Antwerp, and I now slipped quietly out of the hotel and started off on a solitary walk.
CHAPTER XXXVI
A SOLITARY WALK
Surely, surely, this livid, copper-tinted noontide, hanging over Antwerp, was conceived in Hades as a presentation of the world's last day.
Indescribably terrible in tone and form, because of its unearthly qualities of smoke, shrapnel, petroleum-fumes, and broken, dissipated clouds, the darkened skies seemed of themselves to offer every element of tragedy, while the city lying stretched out beneath in that agony of silence, that lasted from twelve o'clock to half-past one, was one vast study in blood, fire, ruined houses, ruined pathways, smoke, appalling odours, heart-break and surrender. The last steamer had gone from the Port. The last of the fleeing inhabitants had departed by the Breda Gate. All that was left now was the empty city, waiting for the entrance of the Germans.
Empty were the streets. Empty were the boats, crowded desolately on the Scheldt. Empty were those hundreds of deserted motor cars, heaped in great weird, pathetic piles down at the water's edge, as useless as though they were perambulators, because there were no chauffeurs to drive them. Empty was the air of sound except for the howling of dogs that ran about in terror, crying miserably for their owners who had been obliged to desert them. Through the emptiness of the air, when the dogs were not howling, resounded only a terrible, ferocious silence, that seemed to call up mocking memories of the noise the shells had been making incessantly, ever since two nights ago.
It was an hour never to be forgotten, an hour that could never, never come again.
I kept saying that to myself as I continued my solitary walk.