grim business of shot, shell, and bayonet at the front.  But now here was the Dower House accomplishing wonderful idioms in Anglo-French, and an animated guest telling them—­sometimes one understood clearly and sometimes the meaning was clouded—­of men blown to pieces under his eyes, of fragments of human beings lying about in the streets; there was trouble over the expression omoplate d’une femme, until one of the youngsters got the dictionary and found out it was the shoulder-blade of a woman; of pools of blood—­everywhere—­and of flight in the darkness.

Mr. Van der Pant had been in charge of the dynamos at the Antwerp Power Station, he had been keeping the electrified wires in the entanglements “alive,” and he had stuck to his post until the German high explosives had shattered his wires and rendered his dynamos useless.  He gave vivid little pictures of the noises of the bombardment, of the dead lying casually in the open spaces, of the failure of the German guns to hit the bridge of boats across which the bulk of the defenders and refugees escaped.  He produced a little tourist’s map of the city of Antwerp, and dotted at it with a pencil-case.  “The—­what do you call?—­obus, ah, shells! fell, so and so and so.”  Across here he had fled on his becane, and along here and here.  He had carried off his rifle, and hid it with the rifles of various other Belgians between floor and ceiling of a house in Zeebrugge.  He had found the pirate steamer in the harbour, its captain resolved to extract the uttermost fare out of every refugee he took to London.  When they were all aboard and started they found there was no food except the hard ration biscuits of some Belgian soldiers.  They had portioned this out like shipwrecked people on a raft....  The mer had been calme; thank Heaven!  All night they had been pumping.  He had helped with the pumps.  But Mr. Van der Pant hoped still to get a reckoning with the captain of that ship.

Mr. Van der Pant had had shots at various Zeppelins.  When the Zeppelins came to Antwerp everybody turned out on the roofs and shot at them.  He was contemptuous of Zeppelins.  He made derisive gestures to express his opinion of them.  They could do nothing unless they came low, and if they came low you could hit them.  One which ventured down had been riddled; it had had to drop all its bombs—­luckily they fell in an open field—­in order to make its lame escape.  It was all nonsense to say, as the English papers did, that they took part in the final bombardment.  Not a Zeppelin....  So he talked, and the Britling family listened and understood as much as they could, and replied and questioned in Anglo-French.  Here was a man who but a few days ago had been steering his bicycle in the streets of Antwerp to avoid shell craters, pools of blood, and the torn-off arms and shoulder-blades of women.  He had seen houses flaring, set afire by incendiary bombs, and once at a corner he had been knocked off his bicycle by the pouff of a bursting shell....  Not only were these things in the same world with us, they were sitting at our table.