Twice thereafter this play was repeated, with slight variations, and each time we Americans, looking on from our front windows, drew our own conclusions.  Also, from the same vantage point we saw an automobile pass bearing a couple of German officers and a little, scared-looking man in a frock coat and a high hat, whose black mustache stood out like a charcoal mark against the very white background of his face.  This little man, we learned, was the burgomaster, and this day he was being held a prisoner and responsible for the good conduct of some fifty-odd thousand of his fellow citizens.  That night our host, a gross, silent man in carpet slippers, told us the burgomaster was ill in bed at home.

“He suffers,” explained our landlord in French, “from a crisis of the nerves.”  The French language is an expressive language.

Then, coming a pace nearer, our landlord added a question in a cautious whisper.

“Messieurs,” he asked, “do you think it can be true, as my neighbors tell me, that the United States President has ordered the Germans to get out of our country?”

We shook our heads, and he went silently away in his carpet slippers; and his broad Flemish face gave no hint of what corrosive thoughts he may have had in his heart.

It was Wednesday morning when we entered Louvain.  It was Saturday morning when we left it.  This last undertaking was preceded by difficulties.  As a preliminary to it we visited in turn all the stables in Louvain where ordinarily horses and wheeled vehicles could be had for hire.

Perhaps there were no horses left in the stalls—­thanks to either Belgian foragers or to German—­or, if there were horses, no driver would risk his hide on the open road among the German pack trains and rear guards.  At length we did find a tall, red-haired Walloon who said he would go anywhere on earth, and provide a team for the going, if we paid the price he asked.  We paid it in advance, in case anything should happen on the way, and he took us in a venerable open carriage behind two crow-bait skeletons that had once, in a happier day when hay was cheaper, been horses.

We drove slowly, taking the middle of the wide Brussels road.  On our right, traveling in the same direction, crawled an unending line of German baggage wagons and pontoon trucks.  On our left, going the opposite way, was another line, also unending, made up of refugee villagers, returning afoot to the towns beyond Louvain from which they had fled four days earlier.  They were footsore and they limped; they were of all ages and most miserable-looking.  And, one and all, they were as tongueless as so many ghosts.  Thus we traveled; and at the end of the first hour came to the tiny town of Leefdael.