STORIES OF THE WAR PHOTOGRAPHERS IN BELGIUM
An American at the Battlefront
Told by Albert Rhys Williams, War Correspondent
This narrator tells of his experiences with the spy hunters of Belgium. He was swept into the war-stricken country where he was arrested by the Germans, sweating under the German third degree, spending a fearful night on a prison floor, suffering with his fellow prisoners the torments of a trial as a spy in a German military court in Brussels, and finally securing his liberty. He has collected his experiences in a volume under title "In the Claws of the German Eagle," thus preserving in book form his remarkable articles which were first published in The Outlook. A few episodes from his amazing adventures are here given by permission of the publishers, E. P. Dutton and Company: Copyright 1917.
[7] I—STORY OF AN AMERICAN IN GHENT
In the last days of September, the Belgians moving in and through Ghent in their rainbow-colored costumes, gave to the city a distinctively holiday touch. The clatter of cavalry hoofs and the throb of racing motors rose above the voices of the mobs that surged along the streets.
Service was normal in the cafés. To the accompaniment of music and clinking glasses the dress-suited waiter served me a five-course lunch for two francs. It was uncanny to see this blaze of life while the city sat under the shadow of a grave disaster. At any moment the gray German tide might break out of Brussels and pour its turbid flood of soldiers through these very streets. Even now a Taube hovered in the sky, and from the skirmish-line an occasional ambulance rumbled in with its crimsoned load.
I chanced into Gambrinus' café and was lost in the babbling sea of French and Flemish. Above the mêlée of sounds, however, I caught a gladdening bit of English. Turning about, I espied a little group of men whose plain clothes stood out in contrast to the colored uniforms of officers and soldiers crowded into the café. Wearied of my efforts at conversing in a foreign tongue, I went over and said: