After the refugees, the troops. Village streets crowded with military automobiles and trains of baggage wagons and regiments of infantry. Little villas with desolate, surprised and innocent faces, standing back in their gardens; soldiers sitting in their porches and verandahs, soldiers' faces looking out of their windows; soldiers are quartered in every room, and the grass grows high in their gardens. Soldiers run down the garden paths to look at our ambulance as it goes by.
There is excitement in the village streets.
At Saint Nicolas we overtake Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson walking into Antwerp. They tell us the news.
The British troops have come. At last. They have been through before us on their way to Antwerp. Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson have seen the British troops. They have talked to them.
Mr. Davidson cannot conceal his glee at getting in before the War Correspondents. Pure luck has given into his hands the great journalistic scoop of the War in Belgium. And he is not a journalist. He is a sculptor out for the busts of warriors, and for actuality in those tragic and splendid figures that are grouped round memorial columns, for the living attitude and gesture.
We take up Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson, and leave one of our professors (if he is a professor) at Saint Nicolas, for the poor man has come without his passport. He will have to hang about at Saint Nicolas, doing nothing, until such time as it pleases Heaven to send us back from Antwerp. He resigns himself, and we abandon him, a piteous figure wrapped in a brown shawl.
After Saint Nicolas more troops, a few batteries of artillery, some infantry, long, long regiments of Belgian cavalry, coming to the defence of the country outside Antwerp. Cavalry halting at a fork of the road by a little fir-wood. A road that is rather like the road just outside Wareham as you go towards Poole. More troops. And after the troops an interminable procession of labourers trudging on foot. At a distance you take them for refugees, until you see that they are carrying poles and spades. Presently the road cuts through the circle of stakes and barbed wire entanglements set for the German cavalry. And somewhere on our left (whether before or after Saint Nicolas I cannot remember), across a field, the rail embankment ran parallel with our field, and we saw the long ambulance train, flying the Red Cross and loaded with wounded, on its way from Antwerp to Ghent. At this point the line is exposed conspicuously, and we must have been well within range of the German fire, for the next ambulance train—but we didn't know about the next ambulance train till afterwards.
After the circle of the stakes and wire entanglements you begin to think of the bombardment. You strain your ears for the sound of the siege-guns from Namur. Somewhere ahead of us on the horizon there is Antwerp. Towers and tall chimneys in a very grey distance. Every minute you look for the flight of the shells across the grey and the fall of a tower or a chimney. But the grey is utterly peaceful and the towers and the tall chimneys remain. And at last you turn in a righteous indignation and say: "Where is the bombardment?"
The bombardment is at the outer forts.
And where are the forts, then? (You see no forts.)