swept across the fields thrilling us with its
color and its action, the nearby peasants went on spreading
fertilizer quite as calm and unconcerned as we were exhilarated.

"Stupid," "Clods," "Souls of oxen," we commented, yet a
protagonist of the peasant might point out that it was perhaps as
noble and certainly quite as useful to be held by a passion for the
soil as to be caught by the glamour of men riding out to slaughter.
And Zola puts this in the mind of his peasants.

"Why should I lose a day? Soldiers must fight, but folks must live.
It is for me to keep the corn growing."

Deep down into the soil the peasant strikes his roots. Urban
people can never comprehend when these roots are cut away how
hopelessly-lost and adrift this European peasant in particular
becomes. Wicked as the Great War has seemed to us in its
bearing down upon these innocent folks, yet we can never
understand the cruelty that they have suffered in being uprooted
from the land and sent forth to become beggars and wanderers
upon the highroads of the world.

Chapter X

The Little Belgian Who Said, "You Betcha"

In the fighting around Termonde the bridge over the Scheldt had
been three times blown up and three times reconstructed. Wires
now led to explosives under the bridge on the Termonde side, and
on the side held by the Belgians they led to a table in the room of
the commanding officer. In this table was an electric button. By the
button stood an officer. The entrance of the Germans on that
bridge was the signal for the officer to push that button, and thus to
blow both bridge and Germans into bits.

But the Belgians were taking no chances. If by any mishap that
electric connection should fail them, it would devolve upon the
artillery lined upon the bank to rake the bridge with shrapnel. A
roofed-over trench ran along the river like a levee and bristled with
machine guns whose muzzles were also trained upon the bridge.
Full caissons of ammunition were standing alongside, ready to
feed the guns their death-dealing provender, and in the rear, all
harnessed, were the horses, ready to bring up more caissons.

Though in the full blaze of day, the gunners were standing or
crouching by their guns. The watchers of the night lay stretched
out upon the ground, sleeping in the warm sun after their long,
anxious vigil. Stumbling in among them, I was pulled back by one
of the photographers.

"For heaven's sake," he cried, "don't wak