They were polite enough, these piebald gentlemen, and they considered our credentials with an air of mildly courteous interest; but they would give us no passes.  There had been an order.  Who had issued it, or why, was not for us to know.  Going away from there, all downcast and disappointed, we met a French cavalryman.  He limped along in his high dragoon boots, walking with the wide-legged gait of one who had bestraddled leather for many hours and was sore from it.  His horse, which he led by the bridle, stumbled with weariness.  A proud boy scout was serving as his guide.  He was the only soldier of any army, except the Belgian, we had seen so far, and we halted our car and watched him until he disappeared.

However, seeing one tired French dragoon was not seeing the war; and we chafed that night at the delay which kept us penned as prisoners in this handsome, outwardly quiet city.  As we figured it we might be housed up here for days or weeks and miss all the operations in the field.  When morning came, though, we discovered that the bars were down again, and that certificates signed by the American consul would be sufficient to carry us as far as the outlying suburbs at least.

Securing these precious papers, then, without delay we chartered a rickety red taxicab for the day; and piling in we told the driver to take us eastward as far as he could go before the outposts turned us back.  He took us, therefore, at a buzzing clip through the Bois, along one flank of the magnificent Forest of Soigne, with its miles of green-trunked beech trees, and by way of the royal park of Tervueren.  From the edge of the thickly settled district onward we passed barricade after barricade—­some built of newly felled trees; some of street cars drawn across the road in double rows; some of street cobbles chinked with turf; and some of barbed wire—­all of them, even to our inexperienced eyes, seeming but flimsy defenses to interpose against a force of any size or determination.  But the Belgians appeared to set great store by these playthings.

Behind each of them was a mixed group of soldiers—­Garde Civique, gendarmes and burgher volunteers.  These latter mainly carried shotguns and wore floppy blue caps and long blue blouses, which buttoned down their backs with big horn buttons, like little girls’ pinafores.  There was, we learned, a touch of sentiment about the sudden appearance of those most unsoldierly looking vestments.  In the revolution of 1830, when the men of Brussels fought the Hollanders all morning, stopped for dinner at midday and then fought again all afternoon, and by alternately fighting and eating wore out the enemy and won their national independence, they wore such caps and such back-buttoning blouses.  And so all night long women in the hospitals had sat up cutting out and basting together the garments of glory for their menfolk.