II—IN PATH OF PRUSSIAN INVADERS
Time passed, and the war broke out. Terbeeke was not in the direct path of the invaders, and, sheltered behind the forest, it almost seemed to the townspeople as though they might escape the fate of the rest of Belgium. But the respite was not for long. The low muttering of distant guns grew every day louder; the stream of fugitives hurrying through the forest and past the town towards the French frontier grew always denser; at last the climax came. A British officer dashed into the town at three o'clock in the morning and hurried into the Mairie. The civilian population, it was announced, must evacuate their houses instantly.
There followed the usual scenes of frantic terror and chaotic haste that happened so often during the opening chapters of the Great War. The one road out of the town was blocked with every kind of conveyance, from bicycle to dog-carts; there were blocks at every corner; precious minutes were wasted in useless recriminations; and long before the last civilian had left, the turmoil of desperate fighting was heard coming always nearer through the dim mystery of the forest.
It was one of the incidents of the Great Retreat. A flank battalion of British infantry, by some mishap, lost direction. Cut off from the main body, and fighting desperately, it was driven always further from the path along which safety lay, until at last, flinging itself into the forest of Terbeeke, for a whole day and night it held off the furious attacks of a brigade of Prussians.
But the odds were too great. Slowly but surely the battalion was forced back through the forest to the very outskirts. Back from there, after another frantic assault, it reeled, reduced now to two sparse companies—some three hundred men in all—-across the little edging of cornfields into the stricken streets of Terbeeke.
There, at last, it found some respite. The Prussians, having learnt by bitter experience the fighting value of the "contemptible" little force arrayed against them, jibbed at the open frontal attack across bare plough-land, and remained hidden within the forest, awaiting reinforcements.
Meanwhile the British remnant fought desperately to establish themselves within the village and turn every house into a citadel; while their commander, a lieutenant of something under twenty-one, racked his brain for some way of escape. At one time it might have been possible to skirt the northern edge of the marsh, but already the attacking Prussians had pushed forward, and the British were now enclosed within a triangle, formed as to its sides by the overwhelming Prussian force, and as to its base by the impassable fastnesses of the mere.
"Unless something happens pretty quick," said the C.O. to his second-in-command, a boy of nineteen, "things are pretty considerably all U-P." (He said something to that effect, I mean. Madame Tavernier's narrative did not, of course, fill in such details.)
They were standing in the porch of the old church, gazing disconsolately over the flat stretches of marshland. The Boche fire had temporarily ceased, and they devoted the respite to seeking some way by which the marsh might be crossed even at the eleventh hour. But there was none, or none which they could discern.