From the neighbourhood of Ypres to the Swiss border No Man's Land
varies. The swamps and flat ground give way to more rolling country,
and this to hills. But in the north No Man's Land is a series of
shallow lakes, lying in flat, unprotected country.

For Belgium, in desperation, last October opened the sluices and let
in the sea. It crept in steadily, each high tide advancing the flood
farther. It followed the lines of canal and irrigation ditches mile
after mile till it had got as far south as Ypres, beyond Ypres indeed.
To the encroachment of the sea was added the flooding resulting from
an abnormally rainy winter. Ordinarily the ditches have carried off
the rain; now even where the inundation does not reach it lies in
great ponds. Belgium's fertile sugar-beet fields are under salt water.

The method was effectual, during the winter, at least, in retarding
the German advance. Their artillery destroyed the towns behind the
opposing trenches of the Allies, but their attempts to advance through
the flood failed.

Even where the floods were shallow--only two feet or so--they served
their purpose in masking the character of the land. From a wading
depth of two feet, charging soldiers stepped frequently into a deep
ditch and drowned ignominiously.

It is a noble thing, war! It is good for a country. It unites its
people and develops national spirit!

Great poems have been written about charges. Will there ever be any
great poems about these men who have been drowned in ditches? Or about
the soldiers who have been caught in the barbed wire with which these
inland lakes are filled? Or about the wounded who fall helpless into
the flood?

The inland lakes that ripple under the wind from the sea, or gleam
silver in the light of the moon, are beautiful, hideous, filled with
bodies that rise and float, face down. And yet here and there the
situation is not without a sort of grim humour. Brilliant engineers on
one side or the other are experimenting with the flood. Occasionally
trenches hitherto dry and fairly comfortable find themselves
unexpectedly filling with water, as the other side devises some clever
scheme for turning the flood from a menace into a military asset.

In No Man's Land are the outposts.

The fighting of the winter has mystified many noncombatants, with its
advances and retreats, which have yet resulted in no definite change
of the line. In many instances this sharp fighting has been a matter
of outposts, generally farms, churches or other isolated buildings,
sometimes even tiny villages. In the inundated portion of Belgium
these outposts are buildings which, situated on rather higher land, a
foot or two above the flood, have become islands. Much of the fighting
in the north has been about these island outposts. Under the
conditions, charges must be made by relatively small bodies of men.
The outposts can similarly house but few troops.

They are generally defended by barbed wire and a few quick-firing
guns. Their purpose is strategical; they are vantage points from which
the enemy may be closely watched. They change sides frequently; are
won and lost, and won again.

Here and there the side at the time in command of the outpost builds
out from its trenches through the flood a pathway of bags of earth,
topped by fascines or bundles of fagots tied together. Such a path
pays a tribute of many lives for every yard of advance. It is built
under fire; it remains under fire. It is destroyed and reconstructed.

When I reached the front the British, Belgian and French troops in the
north had been fighting under these conditions for four months. My
first visit to the trenches was made under the auspices of the Belgian
Ministry of War. The start was made from the _Mairie_ in Dunkirk,
accompanied by the necessary passes and escorted by an attaché of the
Military Cabinet.

I was taken in an automobile from Dunkirk to the Belgian Army
Headquarters, where an officer of the headquarters staff, Captain
F----, took charge. The headquarters had been a brewery.

Stripped of the impedimenta of its previous occupation, it now housed
the officers of the staff.

Since that time I have frequently visited the headquarters staffs of
various armies or their divisions. I became familiar with the long,
bare tables stacked with papers, the lamps, the maps on the walls, the
telephones, the coming and going of dispatch riders in black leather.
I came to know something of the chafing restlessness of these men who
must sit, well behind the firing line, and play paper battles on which
lives and empires hang.

But one thing never ceased to puzzle me.

That night, in a small kitchen behind the Belgian headquarters rooms,
a French peasant woman was cooking the evening meal. Always, at all
the headquarters that were near the front, somewhere in a back room
was a resigned-looking peasant woman cooking a meal. Children hung
about the stove or stood in corners looking out at the strange new
life that surrounded them. Peasants too old for war, their occupations
gone, sat listlessly with hanging hands, their faces the faces of
bewildered children; their clean floors were tracked by the muddy
boots of soldiers; their orderly lives disturbed, uprooted; their once
tidy farmyards were filled with transports; their barns with army
horses; their windmills, instead of housing sacks of grain, were
occupied by _mitrailleuses_.

What were the thoughts of these people? What are they thinking
now?--for they are still there. What does it all mean to them? Do they
ever glance at the moving cord of the war map on the wall? Is this war
to them only a matter of a courtyard or a windmill? Of mud and the
upheaval of quiet lives? They appear to be waiting--for spring,
probably, and the end of hostilities; for spring and the planting of
crops, for quiet nights to sleep and days to labour.

The young men are always at the front. They who are left express
confidence that these their sons and husbands will return. And yet in
the spring many of them ploughed shallow over battlefields.

It had been planned to show me first a detail map of the places I was
to visit, and with this map before me to explain the present position
of the Belgian line along the embankment of the railroad from Nieuport
to Dixmude. The map was ready on a table in the officers' mess, a bare
room with three long tables of planks, to which a flight of half a
dozen steps led from the headquarters room below.

Twilight had fallen by that time. It had commenced to rain. I could
see through the window heavy drops that stirred the green surface of
the moat at one side of the old building. On the wall hung the
advertisement of an American harvester, a reminder of more peaceful
days. The beating of the rain kept time to the story Captain F----
told that night, bending over the map and tracing his country's ruin
with his forefinger.

Much of it is already history. The surprise and fury of the Germans on
discovering that what they had considered a contemptible military
force was successfully holding them back until the English and French
Armies could get into the field; the policy of systematic terrorism
that followed this discovery; the unpreparedness of Belgium's allies,
which left this heroic little army practically unsupported for so long
against the German tidal wave.

The great battle of the Yser is also history. I shall not repeat the
dramatic recital of the Belgian retreat to this point, fighting a
rear-guard engagement as they fell back before three times their
number; of the fury of the German onslaught, which engaged the entire
Belgian front, so that there was no rest, not a moment's cessation. In
one night at Dixmude the Germans made fifteen attacks. Is it any
wonder that two-thirds of Belgium's Army is gone?

They had fought since the third of August. It was on the twenty-first
of October that they at last retired across the Yser and two days
later took up their present position at the railway embankment. On
that day, the twenty-third of October, the first French troops arrived
to assist them, some eighty-five hundred reaching Nieuport.

It was the hope of the Belgians that, the French taking their places
on the line, they could retire for a time as reserves and get a little
rest. But the German attack continuing fiercely against the combined
armies of the Allies, the Belgians were forced to go into action
again, weary as they were, at the historic curve of the Yser, where
was fought the great battle of the war. At British Headquarters later
on I was given the casualties of that battle, when the invading German
Army flung itself again and again, for nineteen days, against the
forces of the Allies: The English casualties for that period were
forty-five thousand; the French, seventy thousand; the German, by
figures given out at Berlin, two hundred and fifty thousand. The
Belgian I do not know.

"It was after that battle," said Captain F----, "that the German dead
were taken back and burned, to avoid pestilence."

The Belgians had by this time reached the limit of their resources. It
was then that the sluices were opened and their fertile lowlands
flooded.

On the thirty-first of October the water stopped the German advance
along the Belgian lines. As soon as they discovered what had been done
the Germans made terrific and furious efforts to get forward ahead of
it. They got into the towns of Ramscappelle and Pervyse, where furious
street fighting occurred.

Pervyse was taken five times and lost five times. But all their
efforts failed. The remnant of the Belgian Army had retired to the
railroad embankment. The English and French lines held firm.

For the time, at least, the German advance was checked.

That was Captain F----'s story of the battle of the Yser.

When he had finished he drew out of his pocket the diary of a German
officer killed at the Yser during the first days of the fighting, and
read it aloud. It is a great human document. I give here as nearly as
possible a literal translation.

It was written during the first days of the great battle. For fifteen
days after he was killed the German offensive kept up. General Foch,
who commanded the French Army of the North during that time, described
their method to me. "The Germans came," he said, "like the waves of
the sea!"

The diary of a German officer, killed at the Yser:--

Twenty-fourth of October, 1914:

"The battle goes on--we are trying to effect a crossing of the Yser.
Beginning at 5:45 P.M. the engineers go on preparing their bridging
materials. Marching quickly over the country, crossing fields and
ditches, we are exposed to continuous heavy fire. A spent bullet
strikes me in the back, just below the coat collar, but I am not
wounded.

"Taking up a position near Vandewonde farm, we are able to obtain a
little shelter from the devastating fire of the enemy's artillery. How
terrible is our situation! By taking advantage of all available cover
we arrive at the fifth trench, where the artillery is in action and
rifle fire is incessant. We know nothing of the general situation. I
do not know where the enemy is, or what numbers are opposed to us, and
there seems no way of getting the desired information.

"Everywhere along the line we are suffering heavy losses, altogether
out of proportion to the results obtained. The enemy's artillery is
too well sheltered, too strong; and as our own guns, fewer in number,
have not been able to silence those of the enemy, our infantry is
unable to make any advance. We are suffering heavy and useless losses.

"The medical service on the field has been found very wanting. At
Dixmude, in one place, no less than forty frightfully wounded men were
left lying uncared, for. The medical corps is kept back on the other
side of the Yser without necessity. It is equally impossible to
receive water and rations in any regular way.

"For several days now we have not tasted a warm meal; bread and other
things are lacking; our reserve rations are exhausted. The water is
bad, quite green, indeed; but all the same we drink it--we can get
nothing else. Man is brought down to the level of the brute beast.
Myself, I have nothing left to eat; I left what I had with me in the
saddlebags on my horse. In fact, we were not told what we should have
to do on this side of the Yser, and we did not know that our horses
would have to be left on the other side. That is why we could not
arrange things.

"I am living on what other people, like true comrades, are willing to
give me, but even then my share is only very small. There is no
thought of changing our linen or our clothes in any way. It is an
incredible situation! On every hand farms and villages are burning.
How sad a spectacle, indeed, to see this magnificent region all in
ruins, wounded and dead lying everywhere all round."

Twenty-fifth of October, 1914:

"A relatively undisturbed night. The safety of the bridge over the
Yser has been assured for a time. The battle has gone on the whole day
long. We have not been given any definite orders. One would not think
this is Sunday. The infantry and artillery combat is incessant, but no
definite result is achieved. Nothing but losses in wounded and killed.
We shall try to get into touch with the sixth division of the Third
Reserve Army Corps on our right."

Twenty-sixth of October, 1914:

"What a frightful night has gone by! There was a terrible rainstorm. I
felt frozen. I remained standing knee-deep in water. To-day an
uninterrupted fusillade meets us in front. We shall throw a bridge
across the Yser, for the enemy's artillery has again destroyed one we
had previously constructed.

"The situation is practically unchanged. No progress has been made in
spite of incessant fighting, in spite of the barking of the guns and
the cries of alarm of those human beings so uselessly killed. The
infantry is worthless until our artillery has silenced the enemy's
guns. Everywhere we must be losing heavily; our own company has
suffered greatly so far. The colonel, the major, and, indeed, many
other officers are already wounded; several are dead.

"There has not yet been any chance of taking off our boots and washing
ourselves. The Sixth Division is ready, but its help is insufficient.
The situation is no clearer than before; we can learn nothing of what
is going on. Again we are setting off for wet trenches. Our regiment
is mixed up with other regiments in an inextricable fashion. No
battalion, no company, knows anything about where the other units of
the regiment are to be found. Everything is jumbled under this
terrible fire which enfilades from all sides.

"There are numbers of _francs-tireurs_. Our second battalion is going
to be placed under the order of the Cyckortz Regiment, made up of
quite diverse units. Our old regiment is totally broken up. The
situation is terrible. To be under a hail of shot and shell, without
any respite, and know nothing whatever of one's own troops!

"It is to be hoped that soon the situation will be improved. These
conditions cannot be borne very much longer. I am hopeless. The
battalion is under the command of Captain May, and I am reduced to
acting as _Fourier_. It is not at all an easy thing to do in our
present frightful situation. In the black night soldiers must be sent
some distance in order to get and bring back the food so much needed
by their comrades. They have brought back, too, cards and letters from
those we love. What a consolation in our cheerless situation! We
cannot have a light, however, so we are forced to put into our
pockets, unread, the words of comfort sent by our dear ones--we have
to wait till the following morning.

"So we spend the night again on straw, huddled up close one to another
in order to keep warm. It is horribly cold and damp. All at once a
violent rattle of rifle fire raises us for the combat; hastily we get
ready, shivering, almost frozen."

Twenty-seventh of October, 1914:

"At dawn I take advantage of a few moments' respite to read over the
kind wishes which have come from home. What happiness! Soon, however,
the illusion leaves me. The situation here is still all confusion; we
cannot think of advancing--"

The last sentence is a broken one. For he died.

Morning came and he read his letters from home. They cheered him a
little; we can be glad of that, at least. And then he died.

That record is a great human document. It is absolutely genuine. He
was starving and cold. As fast as they built a bridge to get back it
was destroyed. From three sides he and the others with him were being
shelled. He must have known what the inevitable end would be. But he
said very little. And then he died.

There were other journels taken from the bodies of other German
officers at that terrible battle of the Yser. They speak of it as a
"hell"--a place of torment and agony impossible to describe. Some of
them I have seen. There is nowhere in the world a more pitiful or
tragic or thought-compelling literature than these diaries of German
officers thrust forward without hope and waiting for the end.

At six o'clock it was already entirely dark and raining hard. Even in
the little town the machine was deep in mud. I got in and we started
off again, moving steadily toward the front. Captain F---- had brought
with him a box of biscuits, large, square, flaky crackers, which were
to be my dinner until some time in the night. He had an electric flash
and a map. The roads were horrible; it was impossible to move rapidly.
Here and there a sentry's lantern would show him standing on the edge
of a flooded field. The car careened, righted itself and kept on. As
the roads became narrower it was impossible to pass another vehicle.
The car drew out at crossroads here and there to allow transports to
get by.

CHAPTER X

THE IRON DIVISION

It was bitterly cold, and the dead officer's diary weighed on my
spirit. The two officers in the machine pored over the map; I sat
huddled in my corner. I had come a long distance to do the thing I was
doing. But my enthusiasm for it had died. I wished I had not heard the
diary.

"At dawn I take advantage of a few moments' respite to read over the
kind wishes which have come from home. What happiness!" And then he
died.

The car jolted on.

The soldier and the military chauffeur out in front were drenched. The
wind hurled the rain at them like bullets. We were getting close to
the front. There were shellholes now, great ruts into which the car
dropped and pulled out again with a jerk.

Then at last a huddle of dark houses and a sentry's challenge. The car
stopped and we got out. Again there were seas of mud, deeper even than
before. I had reached the headquarters of the Third Division of the
Belgian Army, commonly known as the Iron Division, so nicknamed for
its heroic work in this war.

The headquarters building was ironically called the "château." It had
been built by officers and men, of fresh boards and lined neatly
inside with newspapers. Some of them were illustrated French papers.
It had much the appearance of a Western shack during the early days of
the gold fever. On one of the walls was a war map of the Eastern
front, the line a cord fastened into place with flag pins. The last
time I had seen such a map of the Eastern front was in the Cabinet
Room at Washington.

A large stove in the centre of the room heated the building, which was
both light and warm. Some fifteen officers received us. I was the only
woman who had been so near the front, for out here there are no
nurses. One by one they were introduced and bowed. There were fifteen
hosts and extremely few guests!

Having had telephone notice of our arrival, they showed me how
carefully they had prepared for it. The long desk was in beautiful
order; floors gleamed snow white; the lamp chimneys were polished.
There were sandwiches and tea ready to be served.

In one room was the telephone exchange, which connected the
headquarters with every part of the line. In another, a long line of
American typewriters and mimeographing machines wrote out and copied
the orders which were regularly distributed to the front.

"Will you see our museum?" said a tall officer, who spoke beautiful
English. His mother was an Englishwoman. So I was taken into another
room and shown various relics of the battlefield--pieces of shells,
rifles and bullets.

"Early German shells," said the officer who spoke English, "were like
this. You see how finely they splintered. The later ones are not so
good; the material is inferior, and here is an aluminum nose which
shows how scarce copper is becoming in Germany to-day."

I have often thought of that visit to the "château," of the beautiful
courtesy of those Belgian officers, their hospitality, their eagerness
to make an American woman comfortable and at home. And I was to have
still further proof of their kindly feeling, for when toward daylight
I came back from the trenches they were still up, the lamps were still
burning brightly, the stove was red hot and cheerful, and they had
provided food for us against the chill of the winter dawn. Out through
the mud and into the machine again. And now we were very near the
trenches. The car went without lights and slowly. A foot off the
centre of the road would have made an end to the excursion.

We began to pass men, long lines of them standing in the drenching
rain to let us by. They crowded close against the car to avoid the
seas of mud. Sometimes they grumbled a little, but mostly they were
entirely silent. That is the thing that impressed me always about the
lines of soldiers I saw going to and from the trenches--their silence.
Even their feet made no noise. They loomed up like black shadows which
the night swallowed immediately.

The car stopped again. We had made another leg of the journey. And
this time our destination was a church. We were close behind the
trenches now and our movements were made with extreme caution. Captain
F---- piloted me through the mud.

"We will go quietly," he said. "Many of them are doubtless sleeping;
they are but just out of the trenches and very tired."

Now and then one encounters in this war a picture that cannot be
painted. Such a picture is that little church just behind the Belgian
lines at L----. There are no pews, of course, in Continental churches.
The chairs had been piled up in a corner near the altar, and on the
stone floor thus left vacant had been spread quantities of straw.
Lying on the straw and covered by their overcoats were perhaps two
hundred Belgian soldiers. They lay huddled close together for warmth;
the mud of the trenches still clung to them. The air was heavy with
the odour of damp straw.

The high vaulted room was a cave of darkness. The only lights were
small flat candles here and there, stuck in saucers or on haversacks
just above the straw. These low lights, so close to the floor, fell on
the weary faces of sleeping men, accentuating the shadows, bringing
pinched nostrils into relief, showing lines of utter fatigue and
exhaustion.

But the picture was not all sombre. Here were four men playing cards
under an image of Our Lady, which was just overhead. They were muffled
against the cold and speaking in whispers. In a far corner a soldier
sat alone, cross-legged, writing by the light of a candle. His letter
rested on a flat loaf of bread, which was his writing table. Another
soldier had taken a loaf of bread for his pillow and was comfortably
asleep on it.

Captain F---- led the way through the church. He stepped over the men
carefully. When they roused and looked up they would have risen to
salute, but he told them to lie still.

It was clear that the relationship between the Belgian officers and
their troops was most friendly. Not only in that little church at
midnight, but again and again I have seen the same thing. The officers
call their men their "little soldiers," and eye them with affection.

One boy insisted on rising and saluting. He was very young, and on his
chin was the straggly beard of his years. The Captain stooped, and
lifting a candle held it to his face.

"The handsomest beard in the Belgian Army!" he said, and the men round
chuckled.

And so it went, a word here, a nod there, an apology when we disturbed
one of the sleepers.

"They are but boys," said the Captain, and sighed. For each day there
were fewer of them who returned to the little church to sleep.

On the way back to the car, making our way by means of the Captain's
electric flash through the crowded graveyard, he turned to me.

"When you write of this, madame," he said, "you will please not
mention the location of this church. So far it has escaped--perhaps
because it is small. But the churches always suffer."

I regretted this. So many of the churches are old and have the
interest of extreme age, even when they are architecturally
insignificant. But I found these officers very fair, just as I had
found the King of the Belgians disinclined to condemn the entire
German Army for the brutalities of a part of it.

"There is no reason why churches should not be destroyed if they are
serving military purposes," one of them said. "When a church tower
shelters a gun, or is used for observations, it is quite legitimate
that it be subject to artillery fire. That is a necessity of war."

We moved cautiously. Behind the church was a tiny cluster of small
houses. The rain had ceased, but the electric flashlight showed great
pools of water, through which we were obliged to walk. The hamlet was
very silent--not a dog barked. There were no dogs.

I do not recall seeing any dogs at any time along the front, except at
La Panne. What has become of them? There were cats in the destroyed
towns, cats even in the trenches. But there were no dogs. It is not
because the people are not fond of dogs. Dunkirk was full of them when
I was there. The public square resounded with their quarrels and noisy
playing. They lay there in the sun and slept, and ambulances turned
aside in their headlong career to avoid running them down. But the
villages along the front were silent.

I once asked an officer what had become of the dogs.

"The soldiers eat them!" he said soberly.

I heard the real explanation later. The strongest dogs had been
commandeered for the army, and these brave dogs of Flanders, who have
always laboured, are now drawing _mitrailleuses_, as I saw them at
L----. The little dogs must be fed, and there is no food to spare. And
so the children, over whose heads passes unheeded the real
significance of this drama that is playing about them, have their own
small tragedies these days.

We got into the car again and it moved off. With every revolution of
the engine we were advancing toward that sinister line that borders No
Man's Land. We were very close. The road paralleled the trenches, and
shelling had begun again.

It was not close, and no shells dropped in our vicinity. But the low,
horizontal red streaks of the German guns were plainly visible.

With the cessation of the rain had begun again the throwing over the
Belgian trenches of the German magnesium flares, which the British
call starlights. The French call them _fusées_. Under any name I do
not like them. One moment one is advancing in a comfortable obscurity.
The next instant it is the Fourth of July, with a white rocket
bursting overhead. There is no noise, however. The thing is
miraculously beautiful, silent and horrible. I believe the light
floats on a sort of tiny parachute. For perhaps sixty seconds it hangs
low in the air, throwing all the flat landscape into clear relief.

I do not know if one may read print under these _fusées_. I never had
either the courage or the print for the experiment. But these eyes of
the night open and close silently all through the hours of darkness.
They hang over the trenches, reveal the movements of troops on the
roads behind, shine on ammunition trains and ambulances, on the
righteous and the unrighteous. All along the German lines these
_fusées_ go up steadily. I have seen a dozen in the air at once. Their
silence and the eternal vigilance which they reveal are most
impressive. On the quietest night, with only an occasional shot being
fired, the horizon is ringed with them.

And on the horizon they are beautiful. Overhead they are distinctly
unpleasant.

"They are very uncomfortable," I said to Captain F----. "The Germans
can see us plainly, can't they?"

"But that is what they are for," he explained. "All movements of
troops and ammunition trains to and from the trenches are made during
the night, so they watch us very carefully."

"How near are we to the trenches?" I asked.

"Very near, indeed."

"To the first line?"

For I had heard that there were other lines behind, and with the
cessation of the rain my courage was rising. Nothing less than the
first line was to satisfy me.

"To the first line," he said, and smiled.

The wind which had driven the rain in sheets against the car had blown
the storm away. The moon came out, a full moon. From the car I could
see here and there the gleam of the inundation. The road was
increasingly bad, with shell holes everywhere. Buildings loomed out of
the night, roofless and destroyed. The _fusées_ rose and burst
silently overhead; the entire horizon seemed encircled with them. We
were so close to the German lines that we could see an electric signal
sending its message of long and short flashes, could even see the
reply. It seemed to me most unmilitary.

"Any one who knew telegraphy and German could read that message," I
protested.

"It is not so simple as that. It is a cipher code, and is probably
changed daily."

Nevertheless, the officers in the car watched the signalling closely,
and turning, surveyed the country behind us. In so flat a region, with
trees and shrubbery cut down and houses razed, even a pocket flash can
send a signal to the lines of the enemy. And such signals are sent.
The German spy system is thorough and far-reaching.

I have gone through Flanders near the lines at various times at night.
It is a dead country apparently. There are destroyed houses, sodden
fields, ditches lipful of water. But in the most amazing fashion
lights spring up and disappear. Follow one of these lights and you
find nothing but a deserted farm, or a ruined barn, or perhaps nothing
but a field of sugar beets dying in the ground.

Who are these spies? Are they Belgians and French, driven by the ruin
of everything they possess to selling out to the enemy? I think not.
It is much more probable that they are Germans who slip through the
lines in some uncanny fashion, wading and swimming across the
inundation, crawling flat where necessary, and working, an inch at a
time, toward the openings between the trenches. Frightful work, of
course. Impossible work, too, if the popular idea of the trenches were
correct--that is, that they form one long, communicating ditch from
the North Sea to Switzerland! They do not, of course. There are blank
spaces here and there, fully controlled by the trenches on either
side, and reënforced by further trenches behind. But with a knowledge
of where these openings lie it is possible to work through.

Possible, not easy. And there is no mercy for a captured spy.

The troops who had been relieved were moving out of the trenches. Our
progress became extremely slow. The road was lined with men. They
pressed their faces close to the glass of the car and laughed and
talked a little among themselves. Some of them were bandaged. Their
white bandages gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there, as they
passed, one blew on his fingers, for the wind was bitterly cold.

"In a few moments we must get out and walk," I was told. "Is madame a
good walker?"

I said I was a good walker. I had a strong feeling that two or three
people might walk along that road under those starlights much more
safely and inconspicuously than an automobile could move. For
automobiles at the front mean generals as a rule, and are always
subject to attack.

Suddenly the car stopped and a voice called to us sharply. There were
soldiers coming up a side road. I was convinced that we had surprised
an attack, and were in the midst of the German advance. One of the
officers flung the door open and looked out.

But we were only on the wrong road, and must get into reverse and turn
the machine even closer to the front. I know now that there was no
chance of a German attack at that point, that my fears were absurd.
Nevertheless, so keen was the tension that for quite ten minutes my
heart raced madly.

On again. The officers in the car consulted the map and, having
decided on the route, fell into conversation. The officer of the Third
Division, whose mother had been English, had joined the party. He had
been on the staff of General Leman at the time of the capture of
Liège, and he told me of the sensational attempt made by the Germans
to capture the General.

"I was upstairs with him at headquarters," he said, "when word came up
that eight Englishmen had just entered the building with a request to
see him. I was suspicious and we started down the staircase together.
The 'Englishmen' were in the hallway below. As we appeared on the
stairs the man in advance put his hand in his pocket and drew a
revolver. They were dressed in civilians' clothes, but I saw at once
that they were German.

"I was fortunate in getting my revolver out first, and shot down the
man in advance. There was a struggle, in which the General made his
escape and all of the eight were either killed or taken prisoners.
They were uhlans, two officers and six privates."

"It was very brave," I said. "A remarkable exploit."

"Very brave indeed," he agreed with me. "They are all very brave, the
Germans."

Captain F---- had been again consulting his map. Now he put it away.

"Brave but brutal," he said briefly. "I am of the Third Division. I
have watched the German advance protected by women and children. In
the fighting the civilians fell first. They had no weapons. It was
terrible. It is the German system," he went on, "which makes
everything of the end, and nothing at all of the means. It is seen in
the way they have sacrificed their own troops."

"They think you are equally brutal," I said. "The German soldiers
believe that they will have their eyes torn out if they are captured."

I cited a case I knew of, where a wounded German had hidden in the
inundation for five days rather than surrender to the horrors he
thought were waiting for him. When he was found and taken to a
hospital his long days in the water had brought on gangrene and he
could not be saved.

"They have been told that to make them fight more savagely," was the
comment. "What about the official German order for a campaign of
'frightfulness' in Belgium?"

And here, even while the car is crawling along toward the trenches,
perhaps it is allowable to explain the word "frightfulness," which now
so permeates the literature of the war. Following the scenes of the
German invasion into Belgium, where here and there some maddened
civilian fired on the German troops and precipitated the deaths of his
townsmen,[C] Berlin issued, on August twenty-seventh, a declaration,
of which this paragraph is a part:

[Footnote C: The Belgians contend that, in almost every case, such
firing by civilians was the result of attack on their women.]

"The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil
population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to
create examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning to
the whole country."

A Belgian officer once quoted it to me, with a comment.

"This is not an order to the army. It is an attempt at justification
for the very acts which Berlin is now attempting to deny!"

That is how "frightfulness" came into the literature of the war.

Captain F---- stopped the car. Near the road was a ruin of an old
church.

"In that church," he said, "our soldiers were sleeping when the
Germans, evidently informed by a spy, began to shell it. The first
shot smashed that house there, twenty-five yards away; the second shot
came through the roof and struck one of the supporting pillars,
bringing the roof down. Forty-six men were killed and one hundred and
nine wounded."

He showed me the grave from a window of the car, a great grave in
front of the church, with a wooden cross on it. It was too dark to
read the inscription, but he told me what it said:

"Here lie forty-six _chasseurs_." Beneath are the names, one below the
other in two columns, and underneath all: "_Morts pour la Patrie_."

We continued to advance. Our lamps were out, but the _fusées_ made
progress easy. And there was the moon. We had left behind us the lines
of the silent men. The scene was empty, desolate. Suddenly we stopped
by a low brick house, a one-story building with overhanging eaves.
Sentries with carbines stood under the eaves, flattened against the
wall for shelter from the biting wind.

CHAPTER XI

AT THE HOUSE OF THE BARRIER

A narrow path led up to the house. It was flanked on both sides by
barbed wire, and progress through it was slow. The wind caught my rain
cape and tore it against the barbs. I had to be disentangled. The
sentries saluted, and the low door, through which the officers were
obliged to stoop to enter, was opened by an orderly from within.

We entered The House of the Mill of Saint ----.

The House of the Mill of Saint ---- was less pretentious than its
name. Even at its best it could not have been imposing. Now, partially
destroyed and with its windows carefully screened inside by grain
sacks nailed to the frames for fear of a betraying ray of light, it
was not beautiful. But it was hospitable. A hanging lamp in its one
livable room, a great iron stove, red and comforting, and a large
round table under the lamp made it habitable and inviting. It was
Belgian artillery headquarters, and I was to meet here Colonel
Jacques, one of the military idols of Belgium, the hero of the Congo,
and now in charge of Belgian batteries. In addition, since it was
midnight, we were to sup here.

We were expected, and Colonel Jacques himself waited inside the
living-room door. A tall man, as are almost all the Belgian
officers--which is curious, considering that the troops seem to be
rather under average size--he greeted us cordially. I fancied that
behind his urbanity there was the glimmer of an amused smile. But his
courtesy was beautiful. He put me near the fire and took the next
chair himself.

I had a good chance to observe him. He is no longer a young man, and
beyond a certain military erectness and precision in his movements
there is nothing to mark him the great soldier he has shown himself to
be.

"We are to have supper," he said smilingly in French. "Provided you
have brought something to eat with you!"

"We have brought it," said Captain F----.

The officers of the staff came in and were formally presented. There
was much clicking of heels, much deep and courteous bowing. Then
Captain F---- produced his box of biscuits, and from a capacious
pocket of his army overcoat a tin of bully beef. The House of the Mill
of Saint ---- contributed a bottle of thin white native wine and,
triumphantly, a glass. There are not many glasses along the front.

There was cheese too. And at the end of the meal Colonel Jacques, with
great _empressement_, laid before me a cake of sweet chocolate.

I had to be shown the way to use the bully beef. One of the hard flat
biscuits was split open, spread with butter and then with the beef in
a deep layer. It was quite good, but what with excitement and fatigue
I was not hungry. Everybody ate; everybody talked; and, after asking
my permission, everybody smoked. I sat near the stove and dried my
steaming boots.

Afterward I remembered that with all the conversation there was very
little noise. Our voices were subdued. Probably we might have cheered
in that closed and barricaded house without danger. But the sense of
the nearness of the enemy was over us all, and the business of war was
not forgotten. There were men who came, took orders and went away.
There were maps on the walls and weapons in every corner. Even the
sacking that covered the windows bespoke caution and danger.

Here it was too near the front for the usual peasant family huddled
round its stove in the kitchen, and looking with resignation on these
strange occupants of their house. The humble farm buildings outside
were destroyed.

I looked round the room; a picture or two still hung on the walls, and
a crucifix. There is always a crucifix in these houses. There was a
carbine just beneath this one.

Inside of one of the picture frames one of the Colonel's medals had
been placed, as if for safety.

Colonel Jacques sat at the head of the table and beamed at us all. He
has behind him many years of military service. He has been decorated
again and again for bravery. But, perhaps, when this war is over and
he has time to look back he will smile over that night supper with the
first woman he had seen for months, under the rumble of his own and
the German batteries.

It was time to go to the advance trenches. But before we left one of
the officers who had accompanied me rose and took a folded paper from
a pocket of his tunic. He was smiling.

"I shall read," he said, "a little tribute from one of Colonel
Jacques' soldiers to him."

So we listened. Colonel Jacques sat and smiled; but he is a modest
man, and his fingers were beating a nervous tattoo on the table. The
young officer stood and read, glancing up now and then to smile at his
chief's embarrassment. The wind howled outside, setting the sacks at
the windows to vibrating.

This is a part of the poem:

                  _III_

  "_Comme chef nous avons l'homme à la hauteur
  Un homme aimé et adoré de tous
  L'Colonel Jacques; de lui les hommes sont fous
  En lui nous voyons l'emblème de l'honneur.
  Des compagnes il en a des tas: En Afrique
  Haecht et Dixmude, Ramsdonck et Sart-Tilmau
  Et toujours premier et toujours en avant
  Toujours en têt' de son beau régiment,
           Toujours railleur
           Chef au grand coeur_.

                  _REFRAIN_
       "_L'Colo du 12me passe
         Regardez ce vaillant
         Quand il crie dans l'espace
         Joyeus'ment 'En avant!'
         Ses hommes, la mine heureuse
         Gaîment suivent sa trace
         Sur la route glorieuse.
         Saluez-le, l'Colo du 12me passe_.

            "_AD. DAUVISTER_,
                        "SOUS-LIEUTENANT."

We applauded. It is curious to remember how cheerful we were, how warm
and comfortable, there at the House of the Mill of Saint ----, with
war only a step away now. Curious, until we think that, of all the
created world, man is the most adaptable. Men and horses! Which is as
it should be now, with both men and horses finding themselves in
strange places, indeed, and somehow making the best of it.

The copy of the poem, which had been printed at the front, probably on
an American hand press, was given to me with Colonel Jacques'
signature on the back, and we prepared to go. There was much donning
of heavy wraps, much bowing and handshaking. Colonel Jacques saw us
out into the wind-swept night. Then the door of the little house
closed again, and we were on our way through the barricade.

Until now our excursion to the trenches, aside from the discomfort of
the weather and the mud, had been fairly safe, although there was
always the chance of a shell. To that now was to be added a fresh
hazard--the sniping that goes on all night long.

Our car moved quietly for a mile, paralleling the trenches. Then it
stopped. The rest of the journey was to be on foot.

All traces of the storm had passed, except for the pools of mud,
which, gleaming like small lakes, filled shell holes in the road. An
ammunition lorry had drawn up in the shadow of a hedge and was
cautiously unloading. Evidently the night's movement of troops was
over, for the roads were empty.

A few feet beyond the lorry we came up to the trenches. We were behind
them, only head and shoulders above.

There was no sign of life or movement, except for the silent _fusées_
that burst occasionally a little to our right. Walking was bad. The
Belgian blocks of the road were coated with slippery mud, and from
long use and erosion the stones themselves were rounded, so that our
feet slipped over them. At the right was a shallow ditch three or four
feet wide. Immediately beyond that was the railway embankment where,
as Captain F---- had explained, the Belgian Army had taken up its
position after being driven back across the Yser.

The embankment loomed shoulder high, and between it and the ditch were
the trenches. There was no sound from them, but sentries halted us
frequently. On such occasions the party stopped abruptly--for here
sentries are apt to fire first and investigate afterward--and one
officer advanced with the password.

There is always something grim and menacing about the attitude of the
sentry as he waits on such occasions. His carbine is not over his
shoulder, but in his hands, ready for use. The bayonet gleams. His
eyes are fixed watchfully on the advance. A false move, and his
overstrained nerves may send the carbine to his shoulder.

We walked just behind the trenches in the moonlight for a mile. No one
said anything. The wind was icy. Across the railroad embankment it
chopped the inundation into small crested waves. Only by putting one's
head down was it possible to battle ahead. From Dixmude came the
intermittent red flashes of guns. But the trenches beside us were
entirely silent.

At the end of a mile we stopped. The road turned abruptly to the right
and crossed the railroad embankment, and at this crossing was the ruin
of what had been the House of the Barrier, where in peaceful times the
crossing tender lived.

It had been almost destroyed. The side toward the German lines was
indeed a ruin, but one room was fairly whole. However, the door had
been shot away. To enter, it was necessary to lift away an
extemporised one of planks roughly nailed together, which leaned
against the aperture.

The moving of the door showed more firelight, and a very small, shaded
and smoky lamp on a stand. There were officers here again. The little
house is slightly in front of the advanced trenches, and once inside
it was possible to realise its exposed position. Standing as it does
on the elevation of the railroad, it is constantly under fire. It is
surrounded by barbed wire and flanked by trenches in which are
_mitrailleuses_.

The walls were full of shell holes, stuffed with sacks of straw or
boarded over. What had been windows were now jagged openings,
similarly closed. The wind came through steadily, smoking the chimney
of the lamp and making the flame flicker.

There was one chair.

I wish I could go farther. I wish I could say that shells were
bursting overhead, and that I sat calmly in the one chair and made
notes. I sat, true enough, but I sat because I was tired and my feet
were wet. And instead of making notes I examined my new six-guinea
silk rubber rain cape for barbed-wire tears. Not a shell came near.
The German battery across had ceased firing at dusk that evening, and
was playing pinochle four hundred yards away across the inundation.
The snipers were writing letters home.

It is true that any time an artilleryman might lose a game and go out
and fire a gun to vent his spleen or to keep his hand in. And the
snipers might begin to notice that the rain was over, and that there
was suspicious activity at the House of the Barrier. And, to take away
the impression of perfect peace, big guns were busy just north and
south of us. Also, just where we were the Germans had made a terrific
charge three nights before to capture an outpost. But the fact remains
that I brought away not even a bullet hole through the crown of my
soft felt hat.

CHAPTER XII

NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES

When I had been thawed out they took me into the trenches. Because of
the inundation directly in front, they are rather shallow, and at this
point were built against the railroad embankment with earth, boards,
and here and there a steel rail from the track. Some of them were
covered, too, but not with bombproof material. The tops were merely
shelters from the rain and biting wind.

The men lay or sat in them--it was impossible to stand. Some of them
were like tiny houses into which the men crawled from the rear, and by
placing a board, which served as a door, managed to keep out at least
a part of the bitter wind.

In the first trench I was presented to a bearded major. He was lying
flat and apologised for not being able to rise. There was a machine
gun beside him. He told me with some pride that it was an American
gun, and that it never jammed. When a machine gun jams the man in
charge of it dies and his comrades die, and things happen with great
rapidity. On the other side of him was a cat, curled up and sound
asleep. There was a telephone instrument there. It was necessary to
step over the wire that was stretched along the ground.

All night long he lies there with his gun, watching for the first
movement in the trenches across. For here, at the House of the
Barrier, has taken place some of the most furious fighting of this
part of the line.

In the next division of the trench were three men. They were cleaning
and oiling their rifles round a candle.

The surprise of all of these men at seeing a woman was almost absurd.
Word went down the trenches that a woman was visiting. Heads popped
out and cautious comments were made. It was concluded that I was
visiting royalty, but the excitement died when it was discovered that
I was not the Queen. Now and then, when a trench looked clean and dry,
I was invited in. It was necessary to get down and crawl in on hands
and knees.

Here was a man warming his hands over a tiny fire kindled in a tin
pail. He had bored holes in the bottom of the pail for air, and was
shielding the glow carefully with his overcoat.

Many people have written about the trenches--the mud, the odours, the
inhumanity of compelling men to live under such foul conditions.
Nothing that they have said can be too strong. Under the best
conditions the life is ghastly, horrible, impossible.

That night, when from a semi-shielded position I could look across to
the German line, the contrast between the condition of the men in the
trenches and the beauty of the scenery was appalling. In each
direction, as far as one could see, lay a gleaming lagoon of water.
The moon made a silver path across it, and here and there on its
borders were broken and twisted winter trees.

"It is beautiful," said Captain F----, beside me, in a low voice. "But
it is full of the dead. They are taken out whenever it is possible;
but it is not often possible."

"And when there is an attack the attacking side must go through the
water?"

"Not always, but in many places."

"What will happen if it freezes over?"

He explained that it was salt water, and would not freeze easily. And
the cold of that part of the country is not the cold of America in the
same latitude. It is not a cold of low temperature; it is a damp,
penetrating cold that goes through garments of every weight and seems
to chill the very blood in a man's body.

"How deep is the water?" I asked.

"It varies--from two to eight feet. Here it is shallow."

"I should think they would come over."

"The water is full of barbed wire," he said grimly. "And some, a great
many, have tried--and failed."

As of the trenches, many have written of the stenches of this war. But
the odour of that beautiful lagoon was horrible. I do not care to
emphasize it. It is one of the things best forgotten. But any
lingering belief I may have had in the grandeur and glory of war died
that night beside that silver lake--died of an odour, and will never
live again.

And now came a discussion.

The road crossing the railroad embankment turned sharply to the left
and proceeded in front of the trenches. There was no shelter on that
side of the embankment. The inundation bordered the road, and just
beyond the inundation were the German trenches.

There were no trees, no shrubbery, no houses; just a flat road, paved
with Belgian blocks, that gleamed in the moonlight.

At last the decision was made. We would go along the road, provided I
realised from the first that it was dangerous. One or two could walk
there with a good chance for safety, but not more. The little group
had been augmented. It must break up; two might walk together, and
then two a safe distance behind. Four would certainly be fired on.

I wanted to go. It was not a matter of courage. I had simply,
parrot-fashion, mimicked the attitude of mind of the officers. One
after another I had seen men go into danger with a shrug of the
shoulders.

"If it comes it comes!" they said, and went on. So I, too, had become
a fatalist. If I was to be shot it would happen, if I had to buy a
rifle and try to clean it myself to fulfil my destiny.

So they let me go. I went farther than they expected, as it turned
out. There was a great deal of indignation and relief when it was
over. But that is later on.

A very tall Belgian officer took me in charge. It was necessary to
work through a barbed-wire barricade, twisting and turning through its
mazes. The moonlight helped. It was at once a comfort and an anxiety,
for it seemed to me that my khaki-coloured suit gleamed in it. The
Belgian officers in their dark blue were less conspicuous. I thought
they had an unfair advantage of me, and that it was idiotic of the
British to wear and advocate anything so absurd as khaki. My cape
ballooned like a sail in the wind. I felt at least double my ordinary
size, and that even a sniper with a squint could hardly miss me. And,
by way of comfort, I had one last instruction before I started:

"If a _fusée_ goes up, stand perfectly still. If you move they will
fire."

The entire safety of the excursion depended on a sort of tacit
agreement that, in part at least, obtains as to sentries.

This is a new warfare, one of artillery, supported by infantry in
trenches. And it has been necessary to make new laws for it. One of
the most curious is a sort of _modus vivendi_ by which each side
protects its own sentries by leaving the enemy's sentries unmolested
so long as there is no active fighting. They are always in plain view
before the trenches. In case of a charge they are the first to be
shot, of course. But long nights and days have gone by along certain
parts of the front where the hostile trenches are close together, and
the sentries, keeping their monotonous lookout, have been undisturbed.

No doubt by this time the situation has changed to a certain extent;
there has been more active fighting, larger bodies of men are
involved. The spring floods south of the inundation will have dried
up. No Man's Land will have ceased to be a swamp and the deadlock may
be broken.

But on that February night I put my faith in this agreement, and it
held.

The tall Belgian officer asked me if I was frightened. I said I was
not. This was not exactly the truth; but it was no time for the truth.

"They are not shooting," I said. "It looks perfectly safe."

He shrugged his shoulders and glanced toward the German trenches.

"They have been sleeping during the rain," he said briefly. "But when
one of them wakes up, look out!"

After that there was little conversation, and what there was was in
whispers.

As we proceeded the stench from the beautiful moonlit water grew
overpowering. The officer told me the reason.

A little farther along a path of fascines had been built out over the
inundation to an outpost halfway to the German trenches. The building
of this narrow roadway had cost many lives.

Half a mile along the road we were sharply challenged by a sentry.
When he had received the password he stood back and let us pass.
Alone, in that bleak and exposed position in front of the trenches,
always in full view as he paced back and forward, carbine on shoulder,
with not even a tree trunk or a hedge for shelter, the first to go at
the whim of some German sniper or at any indication of an attack, he
was a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure. He looked very young too. I
stopped and asked him in a whisper how old he was.

He said he was nineteen!

He may have been. I know something about boys, and I think he was
seventeen at the most. There are plenty of boys of that age doing just
what that lad was doing.

Afterward I learned that it was no part of the original plan to take a
woman over the fascine path to the outpost; that Captain F---- ground
his teeth in impotent rage when he saw where I was being taken. But it
was not possible to call or even to come up to us. So, blithely and
unconsciously the tall Belgian officer and I turned to the right, and
I was innocently on my way to the German trenches.

After a little I realised that this was rather more war than I had
expected. The fascines were slippery; the path only four or five feet
wide. On each side was the water, hideous with many secrets.

I stopped, a third of the way out, and looked back. It looked about as
dangerous in one direction as another. So we went on. Once I slipped
and fell. And now, looming out of the moonlight, I could see the
outpost which was the object of our visit.

I have always been grateful to that Belgian lieutenant for his
mistake. Just how grateful I might have been had anything untoward
happened, I cannot say. But the excursion was worth all the risk, and
more.

On a bit of high ground stands what was once the tiny hamlet of
Oudstuyvenskerke--the ruins of two small white houses and the tower of
the destroyed church--hardly a tower any more, for only three sides of
it are standing and they are riddled with great shell holes.

Six hundred feet beyond this tower were the German trenches. The
little island was hardly a hundred feet in its greatest dimension.

I wish I could make those people who think that war is good for a
country see that Belgian outpost as I saw it that night under the
moonlight. Perhaps we were under suspicion; I do not know. Suddenly
the _fusées_, which had ceased for a time, began again, and with their
white light added to that of the moon the desolate picture of that
tiny island was a picture of the war. There was nothing lacking. There
was the beauty of the moonlit waters, there was the tragedy of the
destroyed houses and the church, and there was the horror of unburied
bodies.

There was heroism, too, of the kind that will make Belgium live in
history. For in the top of that church tower for months a Capuchin
monk has held his position alone and unrelieved. He has a telephone,
and he gains access to his position in the tower by means of a rope
ladder which he draws up after him.

Furious fighting has taken place again and again round the base of the
tower. The German shells assail it constantly. But when I left Belgium
the Capuchin monk, who has become a soldier, was still on duty; still
telephoning the ranges of the gun; still notifying headquarters of
German preparations for a charge.

Some day the church tower will fall and he will go with it, or it will
be captured; one or the other is inevitable. Perhaps it has already
happened; for not long ago I saw in the newspapers that furious
fighting was taking place at this very spot.

He came down and I talked to him--a little man, regarding his
situation as quite ordinary, and looking quaintly unpriestlike in his
uniform of a Belgian officer with its tasselled cap. Some day a great
story will be written of these priests of Belgium who have left their
churches to fight.

We spoke in whispers. There was after all very little to say. It would
have embarrassed him horribly had any one told him that he was a
heroic figure. And the ordinary small talk is not currency in such a
situation.

We shook hands and I think I wished him luck. Then he went back again
to the long hours and days of waiting.

I passed under his telephone wires. Some day he will telephone that a
charge is coming. He will give all the particulars calmly, concisely.
Then the message will break off abruptly. He will have sent his last
warning. For that is the way these men at the advance posts die.

As we started again I was no longer frightened. Something of his
courage had communicated itself to me, his courage and his philosophy,
perhaps his faith.

The priest had become a soldier; but he was still a priest in his
heart. For he had buried the German dead in one great grave before the
church, and over them had put the cross of his belief.

It was rather absurd on the way back over the path of death to be
escorted by a cat. It led the way over the fascines, treading daintily
and cautiously. Perhaps one of the destroyed houses at the outpost had
been its home, and with a cat's fondness for places it remained there,
though everything it knew had gone; though battle and sudden death had
usurped the place of its peaceful fireside, though that very fireside
was become a heap of stone and plaster, open to winds and rain.

Again and again in destroyed towns I have seen these forlorn cats
stalking about, trying vainly to adjust themselves to new conditions,
cold and hungry and homeless.

We were challenged repeatedly on the way back. Coming from the
direction we did we were open to suspicion. It was necessary each time
to halt some forty feet from the sentry, who stood with his rifle
pointed at us. Then the officer advanced with the word.

Back again, then, along the road, past the youthful sentry, past other
sentries, winding through the barbed-wire barricade, and at last,
quite whole, to the House of the Barrier again. We had walked three
miles in front of the Belgian advanced trenches, in full view of the
Germans. There had been no protecting hedge or bank or tree between us
and that ominous line two hundred yards across. And nothing whatever
had happened.

Captain F---- was indignant. The officers in the House of the Barrier
held up their hands. For men such a risk was legitimate, necessary. In
a woman it was foolhardy. Nevertheless, now that it was safely over,
they were keenly interested and rather amused. But I have learned that
the gallant captain and the officer with him had arranged, in case
shooting began, to jump into the water, and by splashing about draw
the fire in their direction!

We went back to the automobile, a long walk over the shell-eaten roads
in the teeth of a biting wind. But a glow of exultation kept me warm.
I had been to the front. I had been far beyond the front, indeed, and
I had seen such a picture of war and its desolation there in the
centre of No Man's Land as perhaps no one not connected with an army
had seen before; such a picture as would live in my mind forever.

I visited other advanced trenches that night as we followed the
Belgian lines slowly northward toward Nieuport.

Save the varying conditions of discomfort, they were all similar.
Always they were behind the railroad embankment. Always they were
dirty and cold. Frequently they were full of mud and water. To reach
them one waded through swamps and pools. Just beyond them there was
always the moonlit stretch of water, now narrow, now wide.

I was to see other trenches later on, French and English. But only
along the inundation was there that curious combination of beauty and
hideousness, of rippling water with the moonlight across it in a
silver path, and in that water things that had been men.

In one place a cow and a pig were standing on ground a little bit
raised. They had been there for weeks between the two armies. Neither
side would shoot them, in the hope of some time obtaining them for
food.

They looked peaceful, rather absurd.

Now so near that one felt like whispering, and now a quarter of a mile
away, were the German trenches. We moved under their _fusées_, passing
destroyed towns where shell holes have become vast graves.

One such town was most impressive. It had been a very beautiful town,
rather larger than the others. At the foot of the main street ran the
railroad embankment and the line of trenches. There was not a house
left.

It had been, but a day or two before, the scene of a street fight,
when the Germans, swarming across the inundation, had captured the
trenches at the railroad and got into the town itself.

At the intersection of two streets, in a shell hole, twenty bodies had
been thrown for burial. But that was not novel or new. Shell-hole
graves and destroyed houses were nothing. The thing I shall never
forget is the cemetery round the great church.

Continental cemeteries are always crowded. They are old, and graves
almost touch one another. The crosses which mark them stand like rows
of men in close formation.

This cemetery had been shelled. There was not a cross in place; they
lay flung about in every grotesque position. The quiet God's Acre had
become a hell. Graves were uncovered; the dust of centuries exposed.
In one the cross had been lifted up by an explosion and had settled
back again upside down, so that the Christ was inverted.

It was curious to stand in that chaos of destruction, that ribald
havoc, that desecration of all we think of as sacred, and see,
stretched from one broken tombstone to another, the telephone wires
that connect the trenches at the foot of the street with headquarters
and with the "château."

Ninety-six German soldiers had been buried in one shell hole in that
cemetery. Close beside it there was another, a great gaping wound in
the earth, half full of water from the evening's rain.

An officer beside me looked down into it.

"See," he said, "they dig their own graves!"

It was almost morning. The automobile left the pathetic ruin of the
town and turned back toward the "château." There was no talking; a
sort of heaviness of spirit lay on us all. The officers were seeing
again the destruction of their country through my shocked eyes. We
were tired and cold, and I was heartsick.

A long drive through the dawn, and then the "château."

The officers were still up, waiting. They had prepared, against our
arrival, sandwiches and hot drinks.

The American typewriters in the next room clicked and rattled. At the
telephone board messages were coming in from the very places we had
just left--from the instrument at the major's elbow as he lay in his
trench beside the House of the Barrier; from the priest who had left
his cell and become a soldier; from that desecrated and ruined
graveyard with its gaping shell holes that waited, open-mouthed,
for--what?

When we had eaten, Captain F---- rose and made a little speech. It was
simply done, in the words of a soldier and a patriot speaking out of a
full heart.

"You have seen to-night a part of what is happening to our country,"
he said. "You have seen what the invading hosts of Germany have made
us suffer. But you have seen more than that. You have seen that the
Belgian Army still exists; that it is still fighting and will continue
to fight. The men in those trenches fought at Liège, at Louvain, at
Antwerp, at the Yser. They will fight as long as there is a drop of
Belgian blood to shed.

"Beyond the enemy's trenches lies our country, devastated; our
national life destroyed; our people under the iron heel of Germany.
But Belgium lives. Tell America, tell the world, that destroyed,
injured as she is, Belgium lives and will rise again, greater than
before!"

CHAPTER XIII

"WIPERS"

FROM MY JOURNAL:

An aëroplane man at the next table starts to-night on a dangerous
scouting expedition over the German lines. In case he does not return
he has given a letter for his mother to Captain T----.

It now appears quite certain that I am to be sent along the French and
English lines. I shall be the first correspondent, I am told, to see
the British front, as "Eyewitness," who writes for the English papers,
is supposed to be a British officer.

I have had word also that I am to see Mr. Winston Churchill, the First
Lord of the British Admiralty. But to-day I am going to Ypres. The
Tommies call it "Wipers."

Before I went abroad I had two ambitions among others: One was to be
able to pronounce Ypres; the other was to bring home and exhibit to my
admiring friends the pronunciation of Przemysl. To a moderate extent I
have succeeded with the first. I have discovered that the second one
must be born to.

Two or three towns have stood out as conspicuous points of activity in
the western field. Ypres is one of these towns. Day by day it figures
in the reports from the front. The French are there, and just to the
east the English line commences.[D] The line of trenches lies beyond
the town, forming a semicircle round it.

[Footnote D: Written in May, 1915.]

A few days later I saw this semicircle, the flat and muddy battlefield
of Ypres. But on this visit I was to see only the town, which,
although completely destroyed, was still being shelled.

The curve round the town gave the invading army a great advantage in
its destruction. It enabled them to shell it from three directions, so
that it was raked by cross fire. For that reason the town of Ypres
presents one of the most hideous pictures of desolation of the present
war.

General M---- had agreed to take me to Ypres. But as he was a Belgian
general, and the town of Ypres is held by the French, it was a part of
the etiquette of war that we should secure the escort of a French
officer at the town of Poperinghe.

For war has its etiquette, and of a most exacting kind. And yet in the
end it simplifies things. It is to war what rules are to
bridge--something to lead by! Frequently I was armed with passes to
visit, for instance, certain batteries. My escort was generally a
member of the Headquarters' Staff of that particular army. But it was
always necessary to visit first the officer in command of that
battery, who in his turn either accompanied us to the battlefield or
deputised one of his own staff. The result was an imposing number of
uniforms of various sorts, and the conviction, as I learned, among the
gunners that some visiting royalty was on an excursion to the front!

It was a cold winter day in February, a grey day with a fine snow that
melted as soon as it touched the ground. Inside the car we were
swathed in rugs. The chauffeur slapped his hands at every break in the
journey, and sentries along the road hugged such shelter as they could
find.

As we left Poperinghe the French officer, Commandant D----, pointed to
a file of men plodding wearily through the mud.

"The heroes of last night's attack," he said. "They are very tired, as
you see."

We stopped the car and let the men file past. They did not look like
heroes; they looked tired and dirty and depressed. Although our
automobile generally attracted much attention, scarcely a man lifted
his head to glance at us. They went on drearily through the mud under
the pelting sleet, drooping from fatigue and evidently suffering from
keen reaction after the excitement of the night before.

I have heard the French soldier criticised for this reaction. It may
certainly be forgiven him, in view of his splendid bravery. But part
of the criticism is doubtless justified. The English Tommy fights as
he does everything else. There is a certain sporting element in what
he does. He puts into his fighting the same fairness he puts into
sport, and it is a point of honour with him to keep cool. The English
gunner will admire the enemy's marksmanship while he is ducking a
shell.

The French soldier, on the other hand, fights under keen excitement.
He is temperamental, imaginative; as he fights he remembers all the
bitterness of the past, its wrongs, its cruelties. He sees blood.
There is nothing that will hold him back. The result has made history,
is making history to-day.

But he has the reaction of his temperament. Who shall say he is not
entitled to it?

Something of this I mentioned to Monsieur le Commandant as the line
filed past.

"It is because it is fighting that gets nowhere," he replied. "If our
men, after such an attack, could advance, could do anything but crawl
back into holes full of water and mud, you would see them gay and
smiling to-day."

After a time I discovered that the same situation holds to a certain
extent in all the armies. If his fighting gets him anywhere the
soldier is content. The line has made a gain. What matter wet
trenches, discomfort, freezing cold? The line has made a gain. It is
lack of movement that sends their spirits down, the fearful boredom of
the trenches, varied only by the dropping shells, so that they term
themselves, ironically, "Cannon food."

We left the victorious company behind, making their way toward
whatever church bedded down with straw, or coach-house or drafty barn
was to house them for their rest period.

"They have been fighting waist-deep in water," said the Commandant,
"and last night was cold. The British soldier rubs his body with oil
and grease before he dresses for the trenches. I hope that before long
our men may do this also. It is a great protection."

I have in front of me now a German soldier's fatigue cap, taken by one
of those men from a dead soldier who lay in front of the trench.

It is a pathetic cap, still bearing the crease which showed how he
folded it to thrust it into his pocket. When his helmet irked him in
the trenches he was allowed to take it <off and put this on. He
belonged to Bavarian Regiment Number Fifteen, and the cap was given
him in October, 1914. There is a blood-stain on one side of it. Also
it is spotted with mud inside and out. It is a pathetic little cap,
because when its owner died, that night before, a thousand other
Germans died with him, died to gain a trench two hundred yards from
their own line, a trench to capture which would have gained them
little but glory, and which, since they failed, lost them everything,
even life itself.

We were out of the town by this time, and started on the road to
Ypres. Between Poperinghe and Ypres were numerous small villages with
narrow, twisting streets. They were filled with soldiers at rest, with
tethered horses being re-shod by army blacksmiths, with small fires in
sheltered corners on which an anxious cook had balanced a kettle.

In each town a proclamation had been nailed to a wall and the
townspeople stood about it, gaping.

"An inoculation proclamation," explained the Commandant. "There is
typhoid here, so the civilians are to be inoculated. They are very
much excited about it. It appears to them worse than a bombardment."

We passed a file of Spahis, native Algerians who speak Arabic. They
come from Tunis and Algeria, and, as may be imagined, they were
suffering bitterly from the cold.

They peered at us with bright, black eyes from the encircling folds of
the great cloaks with pointed hoods which they had drawn closely about
them. They have French officers and interpreters, and during the
spring fighting they probably proved very valuable. During the winter
they gave me the impression of being out of place and rather forlorn.
Like the Indian troops with the British, they were fighting a new
warfare. For gallant charges over dry desert sands had been
substituted mud and mist and bitter cold, and the stagnation of
armies.

Terrible tales have been told of the ferocity of these Arabs, and of
the Turcos also. I am inclined to think they are exaggerated. But
certainly, met with on a lonely road, these long files of men in their
quaint costumes moving silently along with heads lowered against the
wind were sombre, impressive and rather alarming.

The car, going furiously, skidded, was pulled sharply round and
righted itself. The conversation went on. No one appeared to notice
that we had been on the edge of eternity, and it was not for me to
mention it. But I made a jerky entry in my notebook:

"Very casual here about human life. Enlarge on this."

The general, who was a Belgian, continued his complaint. It was about
the Belgian absentee tax.

The Germans now in control in Belgium had imposed an absentee tax of
ten times the normal on all Belgians who had left the country and did
not return by the fifteenth of March. The general snorted his rage and
disgust.

"But," I said innocently, "I should think it would make very little
difference to you. You are not there, so of course you cannot pay it."

"Not there!" he said. "Of course I am not there. But everything I own
in the world is there, except this uniform that I have on my back."

"They would confiscate it?" I asked. "Not the uniform, of course; I
mean your property."

He broke into a torrent of rapid French. I felt quite sure that he was
saying that they would confiscate it; that they would annihilate it,
reduce it to its atomic constituents; take it, acres and buildings and
shade trees and vegetable garden, back to Germany. But as his French
was of the ninety horse-power variety and mine travels afoot, like
Bayard Taylor, and limps at that, I never caught up with him.

Later on, in a calmer moment, I had the thing explained to me.

It appears that the Germans have instituted a tax on all the Belgian
refugees of ten times the normal tax; the purpose being to bring back
into Belgium such refugees as wish to save the remnants of their
property. This will mean bringing back people of the better class who
have property to save. It will mean to the far-seeing German mind a
return of the better class of Belgians to reorganise things, to put
that prostrate country on its feet again, to get the poorer classes to
work, to make it self-supporting.

"The real purpose, of course," said my informant, "is so that American
sympathy, now so potent, will cease for both refugees and interned
Belgians. If the factories start, and there is work for them, and the
refugees still refuse to return, you can see what it means."

He may be right; I do not think so. I believe that at this moment
Germany regards Belgium as a new but integral part of the German
Empire, and that she wishes to see this new waste land of hers
productive. Assuredly Germany has made a serious effort to reorganise
and open again some of the great Belgian factories that are now idle.

In one instance that I know of a manufacturer was offered a large
guarantee to come back and put his factory into operation again. He
refused, although he knew that it spelled ruin. The Germans, unable
themselves at this time to put skilled labour in his mill, sent its
great machines by railroad back into Germany. I have been told that
this has happened in a number of instances. Certainly it sounds
entirely probable.

The factory owner in question is in America at the time I am writing
this, obtaining credit and new machines against the time of the
retirement of the German Army.

From the tax the conversation went on to the finances of Belgium. I
learned that the British Government, through the Bank of England, is
guaranteeing the payment of the Belgian war indemnity to Germany! The
war indemnity is over nineteen million pounds, or approximately
ninety-six millions of dollars. Of this the Belgian authorities are
instructed to pay over nine million dollars each month.

The Société Générale de Belgique has been obliged by the German
Government to accept the power of issuing notes, on a strict
understanding that it must guarantee the note issue on the gold
reserve and foreign bill book, which is at present deposited in the
Bank of England at London. If the Société Générale de Belgique had not
done so, all notes of the Bank of Belgium would have been declared
valueless by Germany.

A very prominent Englishman, married to a Belgian lady, told me a
story about this gold reserve which is amusing enough to repeat, and
which has a certain appearance of truth.

When the Germans took possession of Brussels, he said, their first
move was to send certain officers to the great Brussels Bank, in whose
vaults the gold reserve was kept. The word had been sent ahead that
they were coming, and demanding that certain high officials of the
bank were to be present.

The officials went to the bank, and the German officers presented
themselves promptly.

The conversation was brief.

"Take us to the vaults," said one of the German officers.

"To the vaults?" said the principal official of the bank.

"To the vaults," was the curt reply.

"I am not the vault keeper. We shall have to send for him."

The bank official was most courteous, quite bland, indeed. The officer
scowled, but there was nothing to do but wait.

The vault keeper was sent for. It took some time to find him.

The bank official commented on the weather, which was, he considered,
extremely warm.

At last the vault keeper came. He was quite breathless. But it seemed
that, not knowing why he came, he had neglected to bring his keys. The
bank official regretted the delay. The officers stamped about.

"It looks like a shower," said the bank official. "Later in the day it
may be cooler."

The officers muttered among themselves.

It took the vault keeper a long time to get his keys and return, but
at last he arrived. They went down and down, through innumerable doors
that must be unlocked before them, through gratings and more steel
doors. And at last they stood in the vaults.

The German officers stared about and then turned to the Belgian
official.

"The gold!" they said furiously. "Where is the gold?"

"The gold!" said the official, much surprised. "You wished to see the
gold? I am sorry. You asked for the vaults and I have shown you the
vaults. The gold, of course, is in England."

We sped on, the same flat country, the same grey fields, the same
files of soldiers moving across those fields toward distant billets,
the same transports and ambulances, and over all the same colourless
sky.

Not very long ago some inquiring British scientist discovered that on
foggy days in London the efficiency of the average clerk was cut down
about fifty per cent. One begins to wonder how much of this winter
_impasse_ is due to the weather, and what the bright and active days
of early spring will bring. Certainly the weather that day weighed on
me. It was easier to look out through the window of the car than to
get out and investigate. The penetrating cold dulled our spirits.

A great lorry had gone into the mud at the side of the road and was
being dug out. A horse neatly disembowelled lay on its back in the
road, its four stark legs pointed upward.

"They have been firing at a German _Taube_," said the Commandant, "and
naturally what goes up must come down."

On the way back we saw the same horse. It was dark by that time, and
some peasants had gathered round the carcass with a lantern. The hide
had been cut away and lay at one side, and the peasants were carving
the animal into steaks and roasts. For once fate had been good to
them. They would dine that night.

Everywhere here and there along the road we had passed the small sheds
that sentries built to protect themselves against the wind, little
huts the size of an American patrol box, built of the branches of
trees and thatched all about with straw.

Now we passed one larger than the others, a shed with the roof
thatched and the sides plastered with mud to keep out the cold.

The Commandant halted the car. There was one bare little room with a
wooden bench and a door. The bench and the door had just played their
part in a tragedy.

I have been asked again and again whether it is true that on both
sides of the line disheartened soldiers have committed suicide during
this long winter of waiting. I have always replied that I do not know.
On the Allied side it is thought that many Germans have done so; I
daresay the Germans make the same contention. This one instance is
perfectly true. But it was the result of an accident, not of
discouragement.

The sentry was alone in his hut, and he was cleaning his gun. For a
certain length of time he would be alone. In some way the gun exploded
and blew off his right hand. There was no one to call on for help. He
waited quite a while. It was night. Nobody came; he was suffering
frightfully.

Perhaps, sitting there alone, he tried to think out what life would be
without a right hand. In the end he decided that it was not worth
while. But he could not pull the trigger of his gun with his left
hand. He tried it and failed. So at last he tied a stout cord to the
trigger, fastened the end of it to the door, and sitting on the bench
kicked the door to. They had just taken him away.

Just back of Ypres there is a group of buildings that had been a great
lunatic asylum. It is now a hospital for civilians, although it is
partially destroyed.

"During the evacuation of the town," said the Commandant, "it was
decided that the inmates must be taken out. The asylum had been hit
once and shells were falling in every direction. So the nuns dressed
their patients and started to march them back along the route to the
nearest town. Shells were falling all about them; the nuns tried to
hurry them, but as each shell fell or exploded close at hand the
lunatics cheered and clapped their hands. They could hardly get them
away at all; they wanted to stay and see the excitement."

That is a picture, if you like. It was a very large asylum, containing
hundreds of patients. The nuns could not hurry them. They stood in the
roads, faces upturned to the sky, where death was whining its shrill
cry overhead. When a shell dropped into the road, or into the familiar
fields about them, tearing great holes, flinging earth and rocks in
every direction, they cheered. They blocked the roads, so that gunners
with badly needed guns could not get by. And behind and all round them
the nuns urged them on in vain. Some of them were killed, I believe.
All about great holes in fields and road tell the story of the hell
that beat about them.

Here behind the town one sees fields of graves marked each with a
simple wooden cross. Here and there a soldier's cap has been nailed to
the cross.

The officers told me that in various places the French peasants had
placed the dead soldier's number and identifying data in a bottle and
placed it on the grave. But I did not see this myself.

Unlike American towns, there is no gradual approach to these cities of
Northern France; no straggling line of suburbs. Many of them were laid
out at a time when walled cities rose from the plain, and although the
walls are gone the tradition of compactness for protection still holds
good. So one moment we were riding through the shell-holed fields of
Northern France and the next we were in the city of Ypres.

At the time of my visit few civilians had seen the city of Ypres since
its destruction. I am not sure that any had been there. I have seen no
description of it, and I have been asked frequently if it is really
true that the beautiful Cloth Hall is gone--that most famous of all
the famous buildings of Flanders.

Ypres!

What a tragedy! Not a city now; hardly a skeleton of a city. Rumour is
correct, for the wonderful Cloth Hall is gone. There is a fragment
left of the façade, but no repairing can ever restore it. It must all
come down. Indeed, any storm may finish its destruction. The massive
square belfry, two hundred and thirty feet high and topped by its four
turrets, is a shell swaying in every gust of wind.

The inimitable arcade at the end is quite gone. Nothing indeed is left
of either the Cloth Hall, which, built in the year 1200, was the most
remarkable edifice of Belgium, or of the Cathedral behind it, erected
in 1300 to succeed an earlier edifice. General M---- stood by me as I
stared at the ruins of these two great buildings. Something of the
tragedy of Belgium was in his face.

"We were very proud of it," he said. "If we started now to build
another it would take more than seven hundred years to give it
history."

There were shells overhead. But they passed harmlessly, falling either
into the open country or into distant parts of the town. We paid no
attention to them, but my curiosity was roused.

"It seems absurd to continue shelling the town," I said. "There is
nothing left."

Then and there I had a lesson in the new warfare. Bombardment of the
country behind the enemy's trenches is not necessarily to destroy
towns. Its strategical purpose, I was told, is to cut off
communications, to prevent, if possible, the bringing up of reserve
troops and transport wagons, to destroy ammunition trains. I was new
to war, with everything to learn. This perfectly practical explanation
had not occurred to me.

"But how do they know when an ammunition train is coming?" I asked.

"There are different methods. Spies, of course, always. And aëroplanes
also."

"But an ammunition train moves."

It was necessary then to explain the various methods by which
aëroplanes signal, giving ranges and locations. I have seen since that
time the charts carried by aviators and airship crews, in which every
hedge, every ditch, every small detail of the landscape is carefully
marked. In the maps I have seen the region is divided into lettered
squares, each square made up of four small squares, numbered. Thus B 3
means the third block of the B division, and so on. By wireless or in
other ways the message is sent to the batteries, and B 3, along which
an ammunition train is moving, suddenly finds itself under fire. Thus
ended the second lesson!

An ammunition train, having safely escaped B 3 and all the other
terrors that are spread for such as it, rumbled by, going through the
Square. The very vibration of its wheels as they rattled along the
street set parts of the old building to shaking. Stones fell. It was
not safe to stand near the belfry.

Up to this time I had found a certain philosophy among the French and
Belgian officers as to the destruction of their towns. Not of Louvain,
of course, or those earlier towns destroyed during the German
invasion, but of the bombardment which is taking place now along the
battle line. But here I encountered furious resentment.

There is nothing whatever left of the city for several blocks in each
direction round the Cloth Hall. At the time it was destroyed the army
of the Allies was five miles in advance of the town. The shells went
over their heads for days, weeks.

So accurate is modern gunnery that given a chart of a city the gunner
can drop a shell within a few yards of any desired spot. The Germans
had a chart of Ypres. They might have saved the Cloth Hall, as they
did save the Cathedral at Antwerp. But they were furious with thwarted
ambition--the onward drive had been checked. Instead of attempting to
save the Cloth Hall they focussed all their fire on it. There was
nothing to gain by this wanton destruction.

It is a little difficult in America, where great structures are a
matter of steel and stone erected in a year or so, to understand what
its wonderful old buildings meant to Flanders. In a way they typified
its history, certainly its art. The American likes to have his art in
his home; he buys great paintings and puts them on the walls. He
covers his floors with the entire art of a nomadic people. But on the
Continent the method is different. They have built their art into
their buildings; their great paintings are in churches or in
structures like the Cloth Hall. Their homes are comparatively
unadorned, purely places for living. All that they prize they have
stored, open to the world, in their historic buildings. It is for that
reason that the destruction of the Cloth Hall of Ypres is a matter of
personal resentment to each individual of the nation to which it
belonged. So I watched the faces of the two officers with me. There
could be no question as to their attitude. It was a personal loss they
had suffered. The loss of their homes they had accepted stoically. But
this was much more. It was the loss of their art, their history, their
tradition. And it could not be replaced.

The firing was steady, unemotional.

As the wind died down we ventured into the ruins of the Cloth Hall
itself. The roof is gone, of course. The building took fire from the
bombardment, and what the shells did not destroy the fire did. Melted
lead from ancient gutters hung in stalactites. In one place a wall was
still standing, with a bit of its mural decoration. I picked up a bit
of fallen gargoyle from under the fallen tower and brought it away. It
is before me now.

It is seven hundred and fifteen years since that gargoyle was lifted
into its place. The Crusades were going on about that time; the robber
barons were sallying out onto the plains on their raiding excursions.
The Norman Conquest had taken place. From this very town of Ypres had
gone across the Channel "workmen and artisans to build churches and
feudal castles, weavers and workers of many crafts."

In those days the Yperlée, a small river, ran open through the town.
But for many generations it has been roofed over and run under the
public square.

It was curious to stand on the edge of a great shell hole and look
down at the little river, now uncovered to the light of day for the
first time in who knows how long.

In all that chaos, with hardly a wall intact, at the corner of what
was once the cathedral, stood a heroic marble figure of Burgomaster
Vandenpeereboom. It was quite untouched and as placid as the little
river, a benevolent figure rising from the ruins of war.

"They have come like a pestilence," said the General. "When they go
they will leave nothing. What they will do is written in what they
have done."

Monsieur le Commandant had disappeared. Now he returned triumphant,
carrying a great bundle in both arms.

"I have been to what was the house of a relative," he explained. "He
has told me that in the cellar I would find these. They will interest
you."

"These" proved to be five framed photographs of the great paintings
that had decorated the walls of the great Cloth Hall. Although they
had been hidden in a cellar, fragments of shell had broken and torn
them. But it was still possible to gain from them a faint idea of the
interior beauty of the old building before its destruction.

I examined them there in the public square, with a shell every now and
then screeching above but falling harmlessly far away.

A priest joined us. He told pathetically of watching the destruction
of the Arcade, of seeing one arch after another go down until there
was nothing left.

"They ate it," said the priest graphically. "A bite at a time."

We walked through the town. One street after another opened up its
perspective of destruction. The strange antics that shell fire plays
had left doors and lintels standing without buildings, had left intact
here and there pieces of furniture. There was an occasional picture on
an exposed wall; iron street lamps had been twisted into travesties;
whole panes of glass remained in façades behind which the buildings
were gone. A part of the wooden scaffolding by which repairs were
being made to the old tower of the Cloth Hall hung there uninjured by
either flame or shell.

On one street all the trees had been cut off as if by one shell, about
ten feet above the ground, but in another, where nothing whatever
remained but piles of stone and mortar, a great elm had apparently not
lost a single branch.

Much has been written about the desolation of these towns. To get a
picture of it one must realise the solidity with which even the
private houses are built. They are stone, or if not, the walls are of
massive brick coated with plaster. There are no frame buildings; wood
is too expensive for that purpose. It is only in prodigal America that
we can use wood.

So the destruction of a town there means the destruction of buildings
that have stood for centuries, and would in the normal course of
events have stood for centuries more.

A few civilians had crept back into the town. As in other places, they
had come back because they had no place else to go. At any time a
shell might destroy the fragment of the building in which they were
trying to reëstablish themselves. There were no shops open, because
there were no shops to open. Supplies had to be brought from long
distances. As all the horses and automobiles had been commandeered by
the government, they had no way to get anything. Their situation was
pitiable, tragic. And over them was the daily, hourly fear that the
German Army would concentrate for its onward drive at some near-by
point.

CHAPTER XIV

LADY DECIES' STORY

It was growing dark; the chauffeur was preparing to light the lamps of
the car. Shells were fewer. With the approach of night the activity
behind the lines increased; more ammunition trains made their way over
the débris; regiments prepared for the trenches marched through the
square on their way to the front.

They were laden, as usual, with extra food and jars of water. Almost
every man had an additional loaf of bread strapped to the knapsack at
his back. They were laughing and talking among themselves, for they
had had a sleep and hot food; for the time at least they were dry and
fed and warm.

On the way out of the town we passed a small restaurant, one of a row
of houses. It was the only undestroyed building I saw in Ypres.

"It is the only house," said the General, "where the inhabitants
remained during the entire bombardment. They made coffee for the
soldiers and served meals to officers. Shells hit the pavement and
broke the windows; but the house itself is intact. It is
extraordinary."

We stopped at the one-time lunatic asylum on our way back. It had been
converted into a hospital for injured civilians, and its long wards
were full of women and children. An English doctor was in charge.

Some of the buildings had been destroyed, but in the main it had
escaped serious injury. By a curious fatality that seems to have
followed the chapels and churches of Flanders, the chapel was the only
part that was entirely gone. One great shell struck it while it was
housing soldiers, as usual, and all of them were killed. As an example
of the work of one shell the destruction of that building was
enormous. There was little or nothing left.

"The shell was four feet high," said the Doctor, and presented me with
the nose of it.

"You may get more at any moment," I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. "What must be, must be," he said quietly.

When the bombardment was at its height, he said, they took their
patients to the cellar and continued operating there. They had only a
candle or two. But it was impossible to stop, for the wards were full
of injured women and children.

I walked through some of the wards. It was the first time I had seen
together so many of the innocent victims of this war--children blind
and forever cut off from the light of day, little girls with arms
gone, women who will never walk again.

It was twilight. Here and there a candle gleamed, for any bright
illumination was considered unwise.

What must they think as they lie there during the long dark hours
between twilight and the late winter morning? Like the sentry, many of
them must wonder if it is worth while. These are people, most of them,
who have lived by their labour. What will they do when the war is
over, or when, having made such recovery as they may, the hospital
opens its doors and must perforce turn them out on the very threshold
of war?

And yet they cling to life. I met a man who crossed the Channel--I
believe it was from Flushing--with the first lot of hopelessly wounded
English prisoners who had been sent home to England from Germany in
exchange for as many wrecked and battered Germans on their way back to
the Fatherland.

One young boy was all eagerness. His home was on the cliff above the
harbour which was their destination. He alternately wept and cheered.

"They'll be glad enough to see me, all right," he said. "It's six
months since they heard from me. More than likely they think I'm lying
over there with some of the other chaps."

He was in a wheeled chair. In his excitement the steamer rug slipped
down. Both his legs were gone above the knees!

Our hands were full. The General had picked up a horseshoe on the
street at Ypres and given it to me to bring me luck; the Commandant
had the framed pictures. The General carried the gargoyle wrapped in a
newspaper. I had the nose of the shell.

We walked through the courtyard, with its broken fountain and cracked
walks, out to the machine. The password for the night was "Écosse,"
which means "Scotland." The General gave the word to the orderly and
we went on again toward Poperinghe, where we were to have coffee.

The firing behind us had ceased. Possibly the German gunners were
having coffee also. We went at our usual headlong speed through almost
empty roads. Now and then a lantern waved. We checked our headlong
speed to give the password, and on again. More lanterns; more
challenges.

Since we passed, a few hours before, another car had been wrecked by
the road. One sees these cars everywhere, lying on their sides, turned
turtle in ditches, bent and twisted against trees. No one seems to be
hurt in these accidents; at least one hears nothing of them, if they
are. And now we were back at Poperinghe again.

The Commandant had his headquarters in the house of a notary. Except
in one instance, all the houses occupied by the headquarters' staffs
that I visited were the houses of notaries. Perhaps the notary is the
important man of a French town. I do not know.

This was a double house with a centre hall, a house of some pretension
in many ways. But it had only one lamp. When we went from one room to
another we took the lamp with us. It was not even a handsome lamp. In
that very comfortable house it was one of the many anomalies of war.

One or two of the best things from the museum at Ypres had been
secured and brought back here. On a centre table was a bronze
equestrian statue in miniature of a Crusader, a beautiful piece of
work.

While we were waiting for coffee the Commandant opened the lower
drawer of a secretary and took out a letter.

"This may interest Madame," he said. "I have just received it. It is
from General Leman, the hero of Liège."

He held it close to the lamp and read it. I have the envelope before
me now. It is addressed in lead pencil and indorsed as coming from
General Leman, Prisoner of War at Magdeburg, Germany.

The letter was a soldier's simple letter, written to a friend. I wish
I had made a copy of it; but I remember in effect what it said.
Clearly the hero of Liège has no idea that he is a hero. He said he
had a good German doctor, but that he had been very ill. It is known,
of course, that his foot was injured during the destruction of one of
the fortresses just before he was captured.

"I have a very good German doctor," he wrote. "But my foot gives me a
great deal of trouble. Gangrene set in and part of it had to be
amputated. The wound refuses to heal, and in addition my heart is
bad."

He goes on to ask for his family, for news of them, especially of his
daughter. I saw this letter in March. He had been taken a prisoner the
previous August. He had then been seven or eight months without news
of his family.

"I am no longer young," he wrote in effect, for I am not quoting him
exactly, "and I hope my friends will not forget me, in case of an
exchange of prisoners."

He will never be forgotten. But of course he does not realise that. He
is sixty-four and very ill. One read through all the restraint of the
letter his longing to die among his own people. He hopes he will not
be forgotten in an exchange of prisoners!

The Commandant's orderly announced that coffee was served, and we
followed the lamp across the hall. An English officer made a fourth at
the table.

It was good coffee, served with cream, the first I had seen for weeks.
With it the Commandant served small, very thin cakes, with a layer of
honey in the centre. "A specialty of the country," he said.

We talked of many things: of the attitude of America toward the war,
her incredulity as to atrocities, the German propaganda, and a rumour
that had reached the front of a German-Irish coalition in the House of
Representatives at Washington.

From that the talk drifted to uniforms. The Commandant wished that the
new French uniforms, instead of being a slaty blue, had been green,
for use in the spring fighting.

I criticised the new Belgian uniform, which seemed to me much thinner
than the old.

"That is wrong. It is of excellent cloth," said the General, and
brought his cape up under the lamp for examination.

The uniforms of three armies were at the table--the French, the
Belgian and the English. It was possible to compare them under the
light of a single lamp.

The General's cloak, in spite of my criticism, was the heaviest of the
three. But all of them seemed excellent. The material was like felt in
body, but much softer.

All of the officers were united in thinking khaki an excellent
all-round colour.

"The Turcos have been put into khaki," said the Commandant. "They
disliked it at first; but their other costumes were too conspicuous.
Now they are satisfied."

The Englishman offered the statement that England was supplying all of
the Allies, including Russia, with cloth.

Sitting round the table under the lamp, the Commandant read a postcard
taken from the body of a dead German in the attack the night before.
There was a photograph with it, autographed. The photograph was of the
woman who had written the card. It began "Beloved Otto," and was
signed "Your loving wife, Hedwig."

This is the postcard:

     "_Beloved Otto_: To-day your dear cards came, so full of anxiety
     for us. So that now at last I know that you have received my
     letters. I was convinced you had not. We have sent you so many
     packages of things you may need. Have you got any of them? To-day I
     have sent you my photograph. I wished to send a letter also instead
     of this card, but I have no writing paper. All week I have been
     busy with the children's clothing. We think of you always, dear
     Otto. Write to us often. Greetings from your Hedwig and the
     children."

So she was making clothing for the children and sending him little
packages. And Otto lay dead under the stars that night--dead of an
ideal, which is that a man must leave his family and all that he loves
and follow the beckoning finger of empire.

"For king and country!"

The Commandant said that when a German soldier surrenders he throws
down his gun, takes off his helmet and jerks off his shoulder straps,
saying over and over, "_Pater familias_." Sometimes, by way of
emphasising that he is a family man, he holds up his fingers--two
children or three children, whatever it may be. Even boys in their
teens will claim huge families.

I did not find it amusing after the postcard and the photograph. I
found it all very tragic and sad and disheartening.

It was growing late and the General was impatient to be off. We had
still a long journey ahead of us, and riding at night was not
particularly safe.

I got into the car and they bundled in after me the damaged pictures,
the horseshoe, the piece of gargoyle from the Cloth Hall and the nose
of the shell.

The orderly reported that a Zeppelin had just passed overhead; but the
General shrugged his shoulders.

"They are always seeing Zeppelins," he said. "Me, I do not believe
there is such a thing!"

That night in my hotel, after dinner, Gertrude, Lady Decies, told me
the following story:

"I had only twelve hours' notice to start for the front. I am not a
hospital nurse, but I have taken for several years three months each
summer of special training. So I felt that I would be useful if I
could get over.

"It was November and very cold. When I got to Calais there was not a
room to be had anywhere. But at the Hotel Centrale they told me I
might have a bathroom to sleep in.

"At the last moment a gentleman volunteered to exchange with me. But
the next day he left, so that night I slept in a bathtub with a
mattress in it!

"The following day I got a train for Dunkirk. On the way the train was
wrecked. Several coaches left the track, and there was nothing to do
but to wait until they were put back on.

"I went to the British Consul at Dunkirk and asked him where I could
be most useful. He said to go to the railroad station at once.

"I went to the station. The situation there was horrible. Three
doctors and seven dressers were working on four-hour shifts.

"As the wounded came in only at night, that was when we were needed. I
worked all night from that time on. My first night we had eleven
hundred men. Some of them were dead when they were lifted out onto the
stone floor of the station shed. One boy flung himself out of the
door. I caught him as he fell and he died in my arms. He had
diphtheria, as well as being wounded.

"The station was frightfully cold, and the men had to be laid on the
stone floors with just room for moving about between them. There was
no heat of any sort. The dead were laid in rows, one on top of
another, on cattle trucks. As fast as a man died they took his body
away and brought in another wounded man.

"Every now and then the electric lights would go out and leave us
there in black darkness. Finally we got candles and lamps for
emergencies.

"We had no surgical dressings, but we had some iodine. The odours were
fearful. Some of the men had not had their clothes off for five weeks.
Their garments were like boards. It was almost impossible to cut
through them. And underneath they were coated with vermin. Their
bodies were black with them frequently.

"In many cases the wounds were green through lack of attention. One
man, I remember, had fifteen. The first two nights I was there we had
no water, which made it terrible. There was a pump outside, but the
water was bad. At last we had a little stove set up, and I got some
kettles and jugs and boiled the water.

"We were obliged to throw the bandages in a heap on the floor, and
night after night we walked about in blood. My clothing and stockings
were stained with blood to my knees.

"After the first five nights I kept no record of the number of
wounded; but the first night we had eleven hundred; the second night,
nine hundred; the third night, seven hundred and fifty; the fourth
night, two thousand; the fifth night, fifteen hundred.

"The men who were working at the station were English Quakers. They
were splendid men. I have never known more heroic work than they did,
and the curé was a splendid fellow. There was nothing too menial for
him to do. He was everywhere."

This is the story she told me that night, in her own words. I have not
revised it. Better than anything I know it tells of conditions as they
actually existed during the hard fighting of the first autumn of the
war, and as in the very nature of things they must exist again
whenever either side undertakes an offensive.

It becomes a little wearying, sometimes, this constant cry of horrors,
the ever-recurring demands on America's pocketbook for supplies, for
dressings, for money to buy the thousands of things that are needed.

Read Lady Decies' account again, and try to place your own son on that
stone floor on the station platform. Think of that wounded boy,
sitting for hours in a train, and choking to death with diphtheria.

This is the thing we call war.

CHAPTER XV

RUNNING THE BLOCKADE

From my journal written during an attack of influenza at the Gare
Maritime in Calais:

Last night I left England on the first boat to cross the Channel after
the blockade. I left London at midnight, with the usual formality of
being searched by Scotland Yard detectives. The train was empty and
very cold.

"At half-past two in the morning we reached Folkestone. I was quite
alone, and as I stood shivering on the quay waiting to have my papers
examined a cold wind from the harbour and a thin spray of rain made
the situation wretched. At last I confronted the inspector, and was
told that under the new regulations I should have had my Red Cross
card viséed in Paris. It was given back to me with a shrug, but my
passport was stamped.

"There were four men round the table. My papers and I were inspected
by each of the four in turn. At last I was through. But to my disgust
I found I was not to be allowed on the Calais boat. There was one
going to Boulogne and carrying passengers, but Calais was closed up
tight, except to troops and officers.

"I looked at the Boulogne boat. It was well lighted and cheerful.
Those few people who had come down from London on the train were
already settling themselves for the crossing. They were on their way
to Paris and peace.

"I did not want Paris and certainly I did not want peace. I had
telegraphed to Dunkirk and expected a military car to meet me at
Calais. Once across, I knew I could neither telegraph nor telephone to
Dunkirk, all lines of communication being closed to the public. I felt
that I might be going to be ill. I would not be ill in Boulogne.

"At the end of the quay, dark and sinister, loomed the Calais boat. I
had one moment of indecision. Then I picked up my suitcase and started
toward it in the rain. Luckily the gangway was out. I boarded the boat
with as much assurance as I could muster, and was at once accosted by
the chief officer.

"I produced my papers. Some of them were very impressive. There were
letters from the French Ambassador in London, Monsieur Cambon, to
leading French generals. There was a letter to Sir John French and
another letter expediting me through the customs, but unluckily the
customs at Boulogne.

"They left him cold. I threw myself on his mercy. He apologised, but
continued firm. The Boulogne boat drew in its gangway. I mentioned
this, and that, so to speak, I had burned my Boulogne gangway behind
me. I said I had just had an interview with Mr. Winston Churchill, and
that I felt sure the First Lord of the Admiralty would not approve of
my standing there arguing when I was threatened with influenza. He
acted as though he had never heard of the First Lord.

"At last he was called away. So I went into a deck cabin, and closed
and bolted the door. I remember that, and that I put a life preserver
over my feet, in case of a submarine, and my fur coat over the rest of
me, because of a chill. And that is all I do remember, until this
morning in a grey, rainy dawn I opened the door to find that we were
entering the harbour of Calais. If the officers of the boat were
surprised to see me emerge they concealed it. No doubt they knew that
with Calais under military law I could hardly slip through the fingers
of the police.

"This morning I have a mild attack of what the English call 'flu.' I
am still at the hotel in Calais. I have breakfasted to the extent of
hot coffee, have taken three different kinds of influenza remedies,
and am now waiting and aching, but at least I am in France.

"If the car from Dunkirk does not come for me to-day I shall be
deported to-night.

"Two torpedo boats are coaling in the harbor. They have two large
white letters which answer for their names. One is the BE; the other
is the ER. As they lie side by side these tall white letters spell
B-E-E-R.

"I have heard an amusing thing: that the English have built duplicates
of all their great battleships, building them of wood, guns and all,
over the hulls of other vessels; and that the Germans have done the
same thing! What would happen if one of the 'dummy' fleets met the
other? Would it be a battle of expletives? Would the German consonant
triumph over the English aspirate, and both ships go down in a sea of
language?

"The idea is, of course, to delude submarines into the belief that
they are sinking battleships, while the real dreadnoughts are
somewhere else--pure strategy, but amusing, except for the crews of
these sham war flotillas."

The French Ambassador in London had given me letters to the various
generals commanding the divisions of the French Army.

It was realised that America knew very little of what the French were
doing in this great war. We knew, of course, that they were holding a
tremendous battle line and that they were fighting bravely. Rumours we
had heard of the great destruction done by the French seventy-five
millimetre gun, and the names of numerous towns had become familiar to
us in print, even when we could not pronounce them. The Paris
omnibuses had gone to the front. Paris fashions were late in coming to
us, and showed a military trend. For the first time the average
American knew approximately where and what Alsace-Lorraine is, and
that Paris has forts as well as shops and hotels.

But what else did we know of France and its part in the war? What does
America generally know of France, outside of Paris? Very little. Since
my return, almost the only question I have been asked about France is:
"Is Paris greatly changed?"

Yet America owes much to her great sister republic; much encouragement
in the arts, in literature, in research. For France has always
extended a kindly hand and a splendid welcome to gifted and artistic
Americans. But her encouragement neither begins nor ends there.

It was in France that American statesmen received the support that
enabled them to rear the new republic on strong and sturdy
foundations. It is curious to think of that France of Louis the
Sixteenth, with its every tradition opposed to the democracy for which
America was contending, sending the very flower of her chivalry to
assist the new republic. It is amazing to remember that when France
was in a deplorable condition financially it was yet found possible to
lend America six million dollars, and to exempt us from the payment of
interest for a year.

And the friendship of France was of the people, not alone of the king,
for it survived the downfall of the monarchy and the rise of the
French Republic. When Benjamin Franklin died the National Assembly at
Paris went into three days' mourning for "the great American."

As a matter of fact, France's help to America precipitated her own
great crisis. The Declaration of Independence was the spark that set
her ablaze. If the king was right in America he was utterly wrong at
home. Lafayette went back from America convinced that "resistance is
the most sacred of duties."

The French adopted the American belief that liberty is the object of
government, and liberty of the individual--that very belief which
France is standing for to-day as opposed to the nationalism of
Germany. The Frenchman believes, like the American, that pressure
should be from within out, not from without in. In other words, his
own conscience, and not the arbitrary ruling of an arbitrary
government, is his dictator. To reconcile liberty and democracy, then,
has been France's problem, as it has been that of America. She has
faced the same problems against a handicap that America has not
had--the handicap of a discontented nobility. And by sheer force and
determination France has won.

It has been said that the French in their Revolution were not reckless
innovators. They were confiding followers. And the star they followed
was the same star which, multiplied by the number of states, is the
American flag to-day--Liberty.

Because of the many ties between the two countries, I had urged on the
French Ambassador the necessity of letting America know a little more
intimately what was being done by the French in this war. Since that
time a certain relaxation has taken place along all the Allied lines.
Correspondents have been taken out on day excursions and have cabled
to America what they saw. But at the time I visited the French Army of
the North there had been no one there.

Those Americans who had seen the French soldier in times of peace had
not been greatly impressed. His curious, bent-kneed, slouching step,
so carefully taught him--so different from the stately progress of the
British, for instance, but so effective in covering ground--his loose
trousers and huge pack, all conspire against the _ensemble_ effect of
French soldiers on the march.

I have seen British regiments at ease, British soldiers at rest and in
their billets. Always they are smart, always they are military. A
French regiment at ease ceases to be a part of a great machine. It
shows, perhaps, more humanity. The men let their muscles sag a bit.
They talk, laugh, sing if they are happy. They lie about in every
attitude of complete relaxation. But at the word they fall in again.
They take up the slack, as it were, and move on again in that
remarkable _pas de flexion_ that is so oddly tireless. It is a
difference of method; probably the best thing for men who are Gallic,
temperamental. A more lethargic army is better governed probably by
rule of thumb.

I had crossed the Channel again to see the French and English lines.
On my previous visit, which had lasted for several weeks, I had seen
the Belgian Army at the front and the French Army in billets and on
reserve. This time I was to see the French Army in action.

The first step to that end, getting out of Calais, proved simple
enough. The car came from Dunkirk, and brought passes. I took more
influenza medicine, dressed and packed my bag. There was some little
regret mingled with my farewell to the hotel at the Gare Maritime. I
had had there a private bath, with a porcelain tub. More than that,
the tub had been made in my home city. It was, I knew, my last glimpse
of a porcelain tub, probably of any tub, for some time. There were
bath towels also. I wondered if I would ever see a bath towel again. I
left a cake of soap in that bathroom. I can picture its next occupant
walking in, calm and deliberate, and then his eye suddenly falling on
a cake of soap. I can picture his stare, his incredulity. I can see
him rushing to the corridor and ringing the fire bell and calling the
other guests and the strangers without the gates, and the boot boy in
an apron, to come and see that cake of soap.

But not the management. They would take it away.

The car which came for me had been at the front all night. It was
filled inside and out with mud, so that it was necessary to cover the
seat before I got in. Of all the cars I have ever travelled in, this
was the most wrecked. Hardly a foot of the metal body was unbroken by
shell or bullet hole. The wind shield had been torn away. Tatters of
curtain streamed out in the wind. The mud guards were bent and
twisted. Even in that region of wrecked cars people turned to look at
it.

Calais was very gay that Sunday afternoon. The sun was out. At the end
of the drawbridge a soldier was exercising a captured German horse.

Officers in scarlet and gold, in pale blue, in green and red, in all
the picturesqueness of a Sunday back from the front, were decked for
the public eye. They walked in groups or singly. There were no women
with them. Their wives and sweethearts were far away. A Sunday in
Calais, indifferent food at a hotel, a saunter in the sunlight, and
then--Monday and war again, with the bright colours replaced by sombre
ones, with mud and evil odours and wretchedness.

They wandered about, smoking eternal cigarettes and watching the
harbour, where ships were coaling, and where, as my car waited, the
drawbridge opened to allow a great Norwegian merchantman to pass. The
blockade was only two days old, but already this Norwegian boat had
her name painted in letters ten feet high along each side of her hull,
flanked on both sides by the Norwegian flag, also painted. Her crew,
leaning over the side, surveyed the quay curiously. So this was
war--this petulant horse with its soldier rider, these gay uniforms!

It had been hoped that neutral shipping would, by thus indicating
clearly its nationality, escape the attacks of submarines. That very
ship was sunk three days later in the North Sea.

Convalescent soldiers limped about on crutches; babies were wheeled in
perambulators in the sun; a group of young aviators in black leather
costumes watched a French biplane flying low. English naval officers
from the coaling boats took shore leave and walked along with the free
English stride.

There were no guns; everything was gaiety and brightness. But for the
limping soldiers, my own battered machine, and the ominous grey ships
in the harbour, it might have been a carnival.

In spite of the appearance of the machine it went northeast at an
incredible pace, its dried mud flying off like missiles, through those
French villages, which are so tidy because there is nothing to waste;
where there is just enough and no more--no extra paper, no extra
string, or food, or tin cans, or any of the litter that goes to make
the disorder of a wasteful American town; where paper and string and
tin cans and old boots serve their original purpose and then, in the
course of time, become flower-pots or rag carpets or soup meat, or
heaven knows what; and where, having fulfilled this second destiny,
they go on being useful in feeding chickens, or repairing roads, or
fertilising fields.

For the first time on this journey I encountered difficulty with the
sentries. My Red Cross card had lost its potency. A new rule had gone
out that even a staff car might not carry a woman. Things looked very
serious for a time. But at last we got through.

There were many aviators out that bright day, going to the front,
returning, or merely flying about taking the air. Women walked along
the roads wearing bright-coloured silk aprons. Here and there the
sentries had stretched great chains across the road, against which the
car brought up sharply. And then at last Dunkirk again, and the royal
apartment, and a soft bed, and--influenza.

Two days later I started for the French lines. I packed a small bag,
got out a fresh notebook, and, having received the proper passes, the
start was made early in the morning. An officer was to take me to the
headquarters of the French Army of the North. From there I was to
proceed to British headquarters.

My previous excursions from Dunkirk had all been made east and
southeast. This new route was south. As far as the town of Bergues we
followed the route by which I had gone to Ypres. Bergues, a little
fortified town, has been at times owned by the French, English,
Spanish and Dutch.

It is odd, remembering the new alignment of the nations, to see
erected in the public square a monument celebrating the victory of the
French over the English in 1793, a victory which had compelled the
British to raise the siege of Dunkirk.

South of Bergues there was no sign of war. The peasants rode along the
road in their high, two-wheeled carts with bare iron hoops over the
top, hoops over which canvas is spread in wet weather.

There were trees again; windmills with their great wings turning
peacefully; walled gardens and wayside shrines; holly climbing over
privet hedges; and rows of pollard willows, their early buds a reddish
brown; and tall Lombardy poplars, yellow-green with spring.

The road stretched straight ahead, a silver line. Nothing could have
been more peaceful, more unwar-like. Peasants trudged along with heavy
milk cans hanging from wooden neck yokes, chickens flew squawking from
the onslaught of the car. There were sheep here and there.

"It is forbidden to take or kill a sheep--except in self-defence!"
said the officer.

And then suddenly we turned into a small town and came on hundreds of
French omnibuses, requisitioned from all parts of France and painted a
dingy grey.

Out of the town again. The road rose now to Cassel, with its three
windmills in a row on the top of a hill. We drove under an arch of
trees, their trunks covered with moss. On each side of the highway
peasants were ploughing in the mud--old peasants, bent to the plough,
or very young boys, who eyed us without curiosity.

Still south. But now there were motor ambulances and an occasional
long line of motor lorries. At one place in a village we came on a
great three-ton lorry, driven and manned by English Tommies. They knew