Young Belgian girls began smiling at soldiers swinging by and the
soldiers grinned back and waved their arms. You might almost have
thought the troops were Allies passing through a friendly community.
This phase of the plastic Flemish temperament made us marvel. When I
was told, a fortnight afterward, how these same people rose in the night
to strike at these their enemies, and how, so doing, they brought about
the ruination of their city and the summary executions of some hundreds
of themselves, I marveled all the more.
Presently, as we sat there, we heard--above the rumbling of cannon
wheels, the nimble clunking of hurrying hoofs and the heavy thudding of
booted feet, falling and rising all in unison--a new note from overhead,
a combination of whir and flutter and whine. We looked aloft. Directly
above the troops, flying as straight for Brussels as a homing bee for
the hive, went a military monoplane, serving as courier and spy for the
crawling columns below it. Directly, having gone far ahead, it came
speeding back, along a lower air lane and performed a series of circling
and darting gyrations, which doubtlessly had a signal-code meaning for
the troops.
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