given a sixty horse-power touring car, and when the weather turned
unpleasant I asked for and was given a limousine that was big
enough to sleep in, and when I found this too clumsy, the
commandant of the Parc des Automobiles obligingly exchanged it
for a ninety horse-power berline. They were most accommodating,
those Belgians. I am sorry to say that my berline, which was the
envy of every one in Antwerp, was eventually captured by the
Germans.

Though both the French and the Germans had for a number of
years been experimenting with armoured cars of various patterns,
the Belgians, who had never before given the subject serious
consideration, were the first to evolve and to send into action a
really practical vehicle of this description. The earlier armoured cars
used by the Belgians were built at the great Minerva factory in
Antwerp and consisted of a circular turret, high enough so that only
the head and shoulders of the man operating the machine-gun
were exposed, covered with half-inch steel plates and mounted on
an ordinary chassis. After the disastrous affair near Herenthals, in
which Prince Henri de Ligne was mortally wounded while engaged
in a raid into the German lines for the purpose of blowing up
bridges, it was seen that the crew of the auto-mitrailleuses, as the
armoured cars were called, was insufficiently protected, and, to
remedy this, a movable steel dome, with an opening for the muzzle
of the machine-gun, was superimposed on the turret. These grim
vehicles, which jeered at bullets, and were proof even against
shrapnel, quickly became a nightmare to the Germans. Driven by
the most reckless racing drivers in Belgium, manned by crews of
dare-devil youngsters, and armed with machine-guns which poured
out lead at the rate of a thousand shots a minute, these wheeled