"Now what's to be done?" asked Rollo.
"Find the girls, if they haven't already left, and get them to a place of safety," replied Kenneth grimly. "We can do no more at present for Belgium; we must look after ourselves and our friends. Lead on: to the St. Nicholas Hospital."
CHAPTER XXVIII
When the City Fell
Shells were beginning to fall upon the roofs of the houses when the lads entered the devoted city. The bulk of the population had already fled. A seemingly never-ending procession of tired, hungry, and despondent refugees poured along the dusty road leading to Bergen-op-Zoom. Others, debarred from taking train owing to Germans having occupied St. Nicholas Station, were making their way by circuitous routes towards Ostend. More were embarking upon craft of all sorts and sizes, whose masters were only too willing to give their suffering countrymen a passage either to the nearest Dutch port or across the North Sea to the shores of hospitable England.
Night had now fallen. It was by no means cold, the frosty nights of mid-September having given place to an autumnal heat-wave. There was little or no wind. The dense smoke from the burning petrol-tanks, which the Belgians had fired rather than let the precious spirit fall into the hands of the enemy, rose straight in the air. Elsewhere other smaller columns of smoke marked the localities where the German incendiary shells had fired portions of the city.
In one of the principal squares, swarms of ragamuffins, acting under the orders of the military, were taking a hideous delight in their work of destruction; for they were busily engaged in smashing costly motor-cars and lorries to useless fragments. Nothing that could be of use to the enemy was permitted to be left intact.
From the direction of the river came the sounds of muffled explosions as the Belgians methodically proceeded to cripple the engines of a fleet of merchant shipping, and to sink lighters filled with stone and concrete to block up the entrances to the various docks.
The Germans were about to take Antwerp—but they were to find in it another Moscow, as Napoleon found it.