smashed doors
and riddled windows. The concussion of a big gunfire had shivered every
window in this quarter of town. There being no sufficient stock of
glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing in
fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched the
holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near by.
Of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum them up:
Few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there was any fresh
glass to buy, and the local glaziers--such of them as survived--would be
serving the colors. All France had gone to war and at this time of
writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams of wounded and
prisoners.

These ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave
the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through
narrow eye slits. The railroad station was windowless, too, like all
the buildings round about, but nobody had closed the openings here, and
it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a North
European fall searched through it.

In this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen.
Even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be
untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them. A
hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick
and crane were hoisting captured French field guns upon flat cars to be
taken to Berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of
the stay-at-homes. A row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were
ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation. Except for the
agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the
place where we sat was pretty quiet. There were a million flies, and
there seemed to be a billion. You wouldn't have thought, unless you had
been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the
world. By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe
of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the
track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin. Even after a night
of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday--as thick and as
clinging and as nasty. Go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter
what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.

As I sit and look back on what I myself have seen of it, this war seems
to me to have bee