Imagine, if you please, standing in the middle of a Belgian highway,
surrounded by German soldiers who looked as though they would
rather shoot you than not, discussing the relative merits of the hotels
at Atlantic City and which had the best dining-car service, the
Pennsylvania or the New York Central!

I learned from the officer, who proved to be an exceedingly
agreeable fellow, that had we advanced ten feet further after the
command to halt was given, we should probably have been planted
in graves dug in a nearby potato field, as only an hour before our
arrival a Belgian mitrailleuse car had torn down the road with its
machine-gun squirting a stream of lead, and had smashed straight
through the German line, killing three men and wounding a dozen
others. They were burying them when we appeared. When our big
grey machine hove in sight they not unnaturally took us for another
armoured car and prepared to give us a warm reception. It was a
lucky thing for us that our brakes worked quickly.

We were the first foreigners to see Aerschot, or rather what was left
of Aerschot after it had been sacked and burned by the Germans. A
few days before Aerschot had been a prosperous and happy town
of ten thousand people. When we saw it it was but a heap of
smoking ruins, garrisoned by a battalion of German soldiers, and
with its population consisting of half a hundred white-faced women.
In many parts of the world I have seen many terrible and revolting
things, but nothing so ghastly, so horrifying as Aerschot. Quite
two-thirds of the houses had been burned and showed unmistakable
signs of having been sacked by a maddened soldiery before they
were burned. Everywhere were the ghastly evidences. Doors had