At the abrupt end of a short row of houses it stopped where it should have turned suddenly, and became a rubbish-heap lying in a waste place.
Just at first I thought we must have gone out of our course somehow and missed the road to Zele. It was difficult to realize that this rubbish-heap lying in a waste place ever had been a road. But for the shell of a house that stood next to it, the last of the row, and the piles of lath and plaster, and the shattered glass on the sidewalk and the blown dust everywhere, it might have passed for the ordinary no-thoroughfare of an abandoned brick-field.
Mr. M. made me keep close under the wall of a barn or something on the other side of the street, the only thing that stood between us and the German batteries. Beyond the barn were the green fields bare to the guns that had shelled this end of the village. At first we hugged our shelter tight, only looking out now and then round the corner of the barn into the open country.
A flat field, a low line of willows at the bottom, and somewhere behind the willows the German batteries. Grey puffs were still curling about the stems and clinging to the tops of the willows. They might have been mist from the river or smoke from the guns we had heard. I hadn't time to watch them, for suddenly Mr. M. darted from his cover and made an alarming sally into the open field.
He said he wanted to find some pieces of nice hot shell for me.
So I had to run out after Mr. M. and tell him I didn't want any pieces of hot shell, and pull him back into safety.
All for nothing. Not a gun fired.
We strolled across what was left of the narrow street and looked through the window-frames of a shattered house. It had been a little inn. The roof and walls of the parlour had been wrecked, so had most of the furniture. But on a table against the inner wall a row of clean glasses still stood in their order as the landlord had left them; and not one of them was broken.
I suppose it must have been about time for the guns to begin firing again, for Mr. L. called to us to come back and to look sharp too. So we ran for it. And as we leaped into the car Mr. L. reproved Mr. M. gravely and virtuously for "taking a lady into danger."
The car rushed back into Baerlaere if anything faster than it had rushed out, Mr. L. sitting bolt upright with an air of great majesty and integrity. I remember thinking that it would never, never do to duck if the shells came, for if we did Mr. L.'s head would stand out like a noble monument and he would be hit as infallibly as any cathedral in Belgium.