serene, smiling, confident, and my sort of evasive
hangdog look as though, in popular parlance, I had just "got one
put over me."

Then, while seated on a battered wall, Ridden poured out his story
of the last two months of hardships and horrors. It was the single
individual's share in the terrific gruelling that the Belgian army had
received while it was beaten back from the eastern frontier to its
stand on the river Scheldt. Always being promised aid by the Allies
if they would hold out just a little longer, they were led again and
again frantically to pit their puny strength against the overwhelming
tide out of the North. For the moment they would stay it. Eagerly
they would listen for sounds of approaching help, asking every
stranger when it was coming. It never came. From position to
position they fell back, stubbornly fighting, a flaming pillar of sparks
and clouds of smoke marking the path of their retreat.

Though smashed and broken that army was never crushed. Its
spirit was incarnate in this cheerful and undaunted Ridden. He
recounted his privations as nonchalantly as if it was just the way
that he had planned to spend his holiday. As a farewell token he
presented me with an epaulet from an officer he had killed, and a
pin from a German woman spy he had captured.

"Be sure to visit me when you get back to America," I cried out
down the street to him.

He stood waving his hand in farewell as in greeting, the same
happy ingenuous look upon his face and sending after me in reply
the same old confident standby, "You betcha." But I do not cherish
a great hope of ever seeing Ridden again. The chances are that,
like most of the Belgian army, he is no longer treading the gray
streets of those demolished cities, but whatever golden streets
there may be in the City Celestial. War is race suicide. It kills the
best and leaves behind the undermuscled and the under-brained
to propagate the species.

Striking farther into the heart of the ruins, we beheld in a section all
burned and shattered to the ground a building which stood straight
up like a cliff intact and undamaged amidst the general wreckage.
As we stumbled over the debris, imagine our surprise when an old
lady of about seventy thrust her head out of a basement window.
She was the owner of the house, and while the city had been the
fighting ground for the armies she had, through it all, bravely stuck
to her home.

"I was born here, I have always lived he