The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was
something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had
been shelled and burned.

A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some
account of it, and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of
secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been
only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns
as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a
tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The
scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same
object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a
patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the
Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive.
Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits
supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every
German cavalryman was a Uhlan, according to popular conception.
These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the
accounts that you read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted
youths, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest in the first flush of war,
returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without
finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss
of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the
eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.

A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with
her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old
with toil. "Les Anglais!" she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had
some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out
half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have
them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express
the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were
burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist
toward the Germans.

When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the
invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average
European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman.
But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his
dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly intrenching back of Louvain, or
flag-bedecked Brussels believing in victory: one of th