Fighting in Flanders | Page 2

German
soldiers--preferably Uhlans. So he obtained a letter of introduction to
some people living in the neighbourhood of Courtrai, on the
Franco-Belgian frontier. He made his way there with considerable
difficulty and received a cordial welcome. The very first night that he
was there a squadron of Uhlans galloped into the town, there was a
slight skirmish, and they galloped out again. The correspondent, who
was a sound sleeper, did not wake up until it was all over. Then he
learned that the Uhlans had ridden under his very window.
Crossing on the same steamer with me from New York was a well-
known novelist who in his spare time edits a Chicago newspaper. He
was provided with a sheaf of introductions from exalted personages and
a bag containing a thousand pounds in gold coin. It was so heavy that
he had brought a man along to help him carry it, and at night they took
turns in sitting up and guarding it. He confided to me that he had spent
most of his life in trying to see wars, but though on four occasions he
had travelled many thousands of miles to countries where wars were in
progress, each time he had arrived just after the last shot was fired. He
assured me very earnestly that he would go back to Michigan
Boulevard quite contentedly if he could see just one battle. I am glad to
say that his perseverance was finally rewarded and that he saw his
battle. He never told me just how much of the thousand pounds he took
back to Chicago with him, but from some remarks he let drop I
gathered that he had found battle-hunting an expensive pastime.
One of the great London dailies was represented in Belgium by a young
and slender and very beautiful English girl whose name, as a novelist

and playwright, is known on both sides of the Atlantic. I met her in the
American Consulate at Ghent, where she was pleading with
Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist her in getting through the German lines
to Brussels. She had heard a rumour that Brussels was shortly going to
be burned or sacked or something of the sort, and she wanted to be on
hand for the burning and sacking. She had arrived in Belgium wearing
a London tailor's idea of what constituted a suitable costume for a war
correspondent--perhaps I should say war correspondentess. Her
luggage was a model of compactness: it consisted of a sleeping-bag, a
notebook, half a dozen pencils--and a powder-puff. She explained that
she brought the sleeping-bag because she understood that war
correspondents always slept in the field. As most of the fields in that
part of Flanders were just then under several inches of water as a result
of the autumn rains, a folding canoe would have been more useful. She
was as insistent on being taken to see a battle as a child is on being
taken to the pantomime. Eventually her pleadings got the better of my
judgment and I took her out in the car towards Alost to see, from a safe
distance, what promised to be a small cavalry engagement. But the
Belgian cavalry unexpectedly ran into a heavy force of Germans, and
before we realized what was happening we were in a very warm corner
indeed. Bullets were kicking up little spurts of dust about us; bullets
were tang-tanging through the trees and clipping off twigs, which fell
down upon our heads; the rat-tat-tat of the German musketry was
answered by the angry snarl of the Belgian machine- guns; in a field
near by the bodies of two recently killed cuirassiers lay sprawled
grotesquely. The Belgian troopers were stretched flat upon the ground,
a veteran English correspondent was giving a remarkable imitation of
the bark on a tree, and my driver, my photographer and I were peering
cautiously from behind the corner of a brick farmhouse. I supposed that
Miss War Correspondent was there too, but when I turned to speak to
her she was gone. She was standing beside the car, which we had left in
the middle of the road because the bullets were flying too thickly to
turn it around, dabbing at her nose with a powder-puff which she had
left in the tonneau and then critically examining the effect in a
pocket-mirror.
"For the love of God!" said I, running out and dragging her back to

shelter, "don't you know that you'll be killed if you stay out here?"
"Will I?" said she, sweetly. "Well, you surely don't expect me to be
killed with my nose unpowdered, do you?"
That evening I asked her for her impressions of her first battle.
"Well," she answered, after a meditative pause, "it certainly was very
chic."
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