ngmen's villages that flanked all or nearly all the outlying and
comparatively isolated factories. In the fields and the truck patches
the farming folks--women and old men usually, with here and there
children--bestirred themselves to get the moldered and mildewed
remnants of their summer-ripened crops under cover before the hard frost
came.

Invariably we found this state of affairs to exist wherever we went in
the districts of France and of Belgium that had been fought over and
which were now occupied by the Germans. Woodlands and cleared places,
where engagements had taken place, would, within a month or six weeks
thereafter, show astonishingly few traces of the violence and death that
had violated the peace of the countryside. New grass would be growing
in the wheel ruts of the guns and on the sides of the trenches in which
infantry had screened itself. As though they took pattern by the
example of Nature, the peasants would be afield, gathering what remained
of their harvests--even plowing and harrowing the ground for new sowing.
On the very edge of the battle front we saw them so engaged, seemingly
paying less heed to the danger of chance shell-fire than did the
soldiers who passed and repassed where they toiled.

In the towns almost always the situation was different. The people who
lived in those towns seemed like so many victims of a universal torpor.
They had lost even their sense of inborn curiosity regarding the passing
stranger. Probably from force of habit, the shopkeepers stayed behind
their counters; but between them and the few customers who came there
was little of the vivacious chatter one has learned to associate with
dealings among the dwellers in most Continental communities. We passed
through village after village and town after town, to find in each the
same picture--men and women in mute clusters about the doorways and in
the little squares, who barely turned their heads as the automobile
flashed by. Once in a while we caught the sound of a brisker tread on
the cobbled street; but when we looked, nine times in ten we saw that
the walker was a soldier of the German garrison quartered there to keep
the population quiet and to help hold the line of communication.

I think, though, this cankered apathy has its merciful compensations.
After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all
who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed
indifference as to