Warren passed on to the Oudekens'
farm, wondering what she would see--Some fresh horror? But on the
contrary, Mme. Oudekens looked years younger; indeed when Vivien
first stood outside the house door, she had heard really hearty
laughter coming from the orchard where the farmer's widow was
pinning up clothes to dry. Yet it was here that the woman's husband
had been shot and buried, as the result of a field-court's sentence.

But when she answered Vivien's questions, after plying her with
innumerable enquiries, she admitted with a blush that Heinrich, the
German sergeant, with whom she had first cohabited by constraint,
had recently married her at the Mairie, though the Cure had refused
to perform the religious service. Heinrich was now invariably kind
and worked hard on the farm. He hoped by diligently supplying the
officers' messes in Brussels with poultry and vegetables that he and
his assistants--two corporals--might be overlooked and not sent back
into the fighting ranks. As to her daughters, after a few months of
promiscuity--a terrible time that Mme. Oudekens wanted to
forget--they had been assigned to the two corporals as their
exclusive property. They were both of them about to become mothers,
and if no one interfered, as soon as this accursed War was over
their men would marry them. "But," said Vivie, "suppose your husband
and these corporals are married already, in Germany?" "Qu'est-ce-que
ca fait?" said Mme. Oudekens. "C'est si loin." By making these
little concessions she had already saved her youngest son from
deportation to Germany.

The enormous demands for food in Brussels, which in 1918 had a
floating population of over a million and where the Germans were
turning large dogs into pemmican, had tripled the value of all
productive farms so near the capital as those round Tervueren,
especially now the railway service was reopened. Many of the
peasants were making huge fortunes in complicity with some German
soldier-partner.

In Brussels itself, soldiers often sided with the people against the
odious "polizei," the intolerable German spies and police agents.
Conflicts would sometimes occur in the trams and the streets when
the German police endeavoured to arrest citizens for reading the
_Times_ or _La Libre Belgique_, or for saying disrespectful things
about the Emperor.

The tremendous rush of the German offensive onward to the Marne,
Somme, and Ypres salient in March-June, 1918, was received by the