advancing toward Antwerp, were skirmishing and making feints in
every direction, with the ultimate disposition of their forces carefully
concealed. Of course, we had no official permission to be at the front
with either army; in fact, up to that point we had received nothing but
official threats on the subject of what would happen to us in case we
went ahead. But as no one did more than threaten, we kept on going,
since we preferred that mode of procedure to sitting around in Paris
or Berlin on the chance of one of those "personally conducted" tours
of inspection, whose purpose is to show the correspondent
everything except actual fighting. It was our hope during that early
part of the war to see as much as possible of the German army,
realizing that, if captured, we should undoubtedly be sent either
backward or forward along the German line of communication in
conquered Belgium. Once within the German outposts we pleaded
like Brer Rabbit not to be thrown into the German brier patch. So of
course we landed in it. After a few days in Brussels they shipped us
Eastward to Aix-la-Chapelle by way of Lou-vain, Tirlemont, and Liege.

It was two days after the second bombardment of Termonde--at 7
A.M., to be exact--that Luther and I started from Ghent for Brussels
in a military automobile, the property of the Belgian Government, and
again loaned for the occasion to Julius Van Hee, American Vice-
Consul, then Acting Consul at Ghent. We carried with us a United
States Government mail pouch, a packet of mail from Dr. Henry van
Dyke, at The Hague, addressed to Brand Whitlock, the American
Minister at Brussels, and another packet of mail from Henry W.
Diederick, United States Consul-General at Antwerp. Mr. Van Hee
hoped to obtain from the German authorities in Brussels some
smallpox vaccine to take back to Ghent, where a smallpox epidemic
was feared.