The town square was full of military automobiles and a few provision wagons. I did not see any fieldpieces or machine guns. Every last one was right up on the firing-line. My feet were tired from walking over the Belgian blocks, and I held tenaciously to the sidewalk passing around the square, though it was mostly taken up with café tables and bay trees in boxes. At one point the tables were empty and a single sentry was sauntering up and down. I stopped to ask him the way to the gendarmerie, and, in the middle of giving me the directions, he came to attention, as a door opened behind me, and saluted.
Two Belgian generals.
Two men came out of the door, one rather tall, with an easy manner, and smartly dressed as a general in the Belgian army. The other was older, also a general, wearing, if anything, the more gold braid of the two. They entered a waiting automobile and drove off as casually as two men at home might leave their office for their club.
Something about the first of the two men impressed me as familiar. I had only seen his back, but that had arrested my attention. I thought possibly I had seen him at the beginning of the war in Brussels, so I asked the sentry his name.
King Albert.
"That is our king, Albert," he said quite simply.
During the next couple of days I saw the King of Belgium a number of times. He spent his nights at a small villa on the seashore at La Panne, a hundred yards possibly beyond the hotel where I spent mine. He passed through the streets as unnoticed as any one of the other Belgians who had retreated from Antwerp and Ghent ahead of the army, but preferred the chilly nights in an unheated seaside hotel in Belgium to comfort somewhere beyond. It seemed to be a point of courtesy on the part of the Belgians not to bother their king with ceremony at this trying time. I doubt if he cares much for ceremony, anyhow. Searching around for a single adjective to describe him, I should call him off-handed. His manner, even then, while alert, was casual. It is easy to see why the Belgians love him. If kings had always been as simple and direct as Albert, I am inclined to think democracy would have languished.
Luncheon at La Panne.
At La Panne, which I reached at noon on a little steam railway running from Furnes, I had luncheon with several Belgian soldiers and a Belgian in civilian clothes, who told me I would see all the fighting I was looking for at Nieuport, just beyond. The civilian, a tall youth with a blond beard, volunteered to show me the way to the beach, the shortest route, and ended by going all the way. He told me he was recovering from an "attack of Congo," which I take to be an intermittent fever. He had just been mustered out of the civic guard and was waiting for a uniform to join the army. He had the afternoon free and his Belgian sense of hospitality impelled him to see that the stranger was properly looked after.
For several miles along the wide, flat beach, which stretches unobstructed as far as Ostend, except for the piers at Nieuport-les-Bains and Westende, there were Belgian soldiers bathing in the shallow water. Some of them, cavalrymen, were riding naked into the deeper water, and this, mind you, was late October. They were even playing jokes on one another, and did not seem to be paying any attention to the fifteen English and French cruisers and gunboats which were standing off the shore almost opposite them, keeping up a steady stream of fire obliquely along the beach at the sand dunes just beyond the pier at Nieuport-les-Bains. In these dunes, five miles away, big German guns were hidden.