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Show WAR AT CLOSE QUARTERS. Arthur Ruhl, who was in Antwerp when the siege reached its climax, writes his experiences for Collier's, which presents a closer and more stirring stir-ring view of what happened in the commercial center of Belgium than has come to our notice from an other source. He begins with a description descrip-tion of the first big shells which fell In the city, as follows "It was almost exactly midnight that I found myself listening, half awake, to the familiar sound of distant cannon can-non One had come to think of It, almost, as nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached and net un pleasant interest as a man tucked comfortably in bed follows a roll of thunder to its end or listens to the fall of rain. It struck me suddenly that there was something new aboui this sound, : I sat up in bed to listen, and at that i instant a far-off, sullen 'Boom!' was j followed by a crash as If lighting had struck a house a little way down the 'street As I hurried to the window there came another far-off detonation, a curious walling whistle swept across the sky, and over behind the roofs to the left there was another craeh. "One after another they came, at Intervals of half a minute, or screaming scream-ing on each other's heek- as if racing to their goal. And Una the crash or, if farther away, muffled explosion as another roof toppled in, or cornice dropped off, as a house made of can vab drops to pieces in a play. "The effect of those unearthly walls. suddenly singing in ucrosa countrv in the dead of night from six eight ten miles away Heaven j knows where was, as the Germans I intended It to be, tremendous It Is not easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who had not lived I In that threptenod city the last Belgian Bel-gian stronghold and felt that vast, unseen power rolling nearer and nearer near-er And ik-w, all at once, It was here, materialized, demoniacal, a fly-iuK fly-iuK death. BwooDini. atroba the dark Into your very room. "It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot stir from your tracks, and meanwhile 'Boom! . . . Tze-ee-ee-ee! ' Is this one meant for you9 "Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and people with white bundles on their backs went stumbling stum-bling by toward the river and the bridge Motors came honking down from the Inner streets, and the quay, which had begun to lear by this time, was again jammed I threw on some clothes, hurried to the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, lighting up the sky for an Instant like the flare from a blast furnace and a few moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire. "I have only coasted along the edges of Belgium's tragedy, and the rest of the story, of which we were a part for the next two days the fight of those hundreds of thousands oi nomeii'ss people is someining mat i can searei'ly he told you must follow it out in imagination into its count-less count-less uprooted, disorganized lives. You must Imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of eoun-tty eoun-tty roads, young girls, under burdens 1 a man might not care to bear,tramp-ing bear,tramp-ing until they had to carry their shos j in their hands and go barefoot to rest j their unaccustomed feet You must 1 Imagine the pathetic efforts of bun j dreds of people to keep clean by washing in wayside streams or ditch- j es; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to be had. 1 families shivering in damp hedge- rows or against haystacks where dark- 1 ness over took them; and you must' imagine this not on one road, but on every road, for mile after mile over a whole countryside. What was to become of these people when their little supply of food was exhausted? Where could they go" Even If back to their homes, it would be but to lift their hats to their conquerors, j never know but that the next week j or month would sweep the tide of war back over them again "Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, has the world seen anything like that fight noth-ing noth-ing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hvsterical women. I ,. x uesporaie, irampimg men, ic&ra .mu screams. In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation protesta-tion at times one might almost have thought it some vast eccentric picnic. pic-nic. No. it was their orderliness, their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable un-mistakable usefulness, which made the waste and Irony of it all so colossal co-lossal and hideous." A few of these real pictures of war should rob even a military man of any desire to see his country involved in war |