thing I ever shall see, I think.

These hollow shells about us were like the picked cadavers of houses.
Ends of burnt and broken rafters stood up like ribs. Empty window
openings stared at us like the eye sockets in skulls. It was not a town
upon which we looked, but the dead and rotting bones of a town.

Just over the ragged line that marked the lowermost limits of the
destructive fury of the conquerors, and inside the section which
remained intact, we traversed a narrow street called--most
appropriately, I thought--the Street of Paul the Penitent, and passed a
little house on the shutters of which was written, in chalked German
script, these words: "A Grossmutter"--grandmother--"ninety-six years old
lives here. Don't disturb her." Other houses along here bore the
familiar line, written by German soldiers who had been billeted in them:
"Good people. Leave them alone!"

The people who enjoyed the protection of these public testimonials were
visible, a few of them. They were nearly all women and children. They
stood in their shallow doorways as our automobile went by bearing four
Americans, two German officers and the orderly of one of the officers--
for we had picked up a couple of chance passengers in Huy--and a German
chauffeur. As we interpreted their looks, they had no hate for the
Germans. I take it the weight of their woe was so heavy on them that
they had no room in their souls for anything else.

Just beyond Dinant, at Anseremme, a beautiful little village at the
mouth of a tiny river, where artists used to come to paint pictures and
sick folks to breathe the tonic balsam of the hills, we got rooms for
the night in a smart, clean tavern. Here was quartered a captain of
cavalry, who found time--so brisk was he and so high-spirited--to
welcome us to the best the place afforded, to help set the table for our
belated supper, and to keep on terms of jovial yet punctilious
amiability with the woman proprietor and her good-looking daughters;
also, to require his troopers to pay the women, in salutes and spoken
thanks, for every small office performed.

The husband of the older woman and the husband of one of the daughters
were then serving the Belgian colors, assuming that they had not been
killed or caught; but between them and this German captain a perfect
understanding had been arrived at. When the head of the house fixed the
prices she meant to charge us for our accommodations, he spoke up and
suggest