o
little daughters, who looked as though they had escaped from a Frans
Hals canvas, waited on us while we wolfed the food down.

Quite casually our hostess showed us a round hole in the window behind
us, a big white scar in the wooden inner shutter and a flattened chunk
of lead. The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown,
had fired a bullet through the window of her house. It was proof of the
rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to
sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident
quietly. Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a
stray bullet or two through her back window? So we interpreted her
attitude.

It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at Merbes-le-
Chateau, but to go off at an angle to La Buissiere, where she had heard
one bridge still stood. She said nothing of a fight at that place. It
is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two towns almost
touched. Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the people so
concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that they seemed
not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or two miles away
had fared.

Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissiere to find
the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also,
and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on which
we stumbled.

Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond
the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth
with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which,
after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and
might become a pestilence. When we told them we meant to enter La
Buissiere they held up their soiled hands in protest.

"There has been much fighting there," one said, "and many are dead, and
more are dying. Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we
do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are
full of Germans. Hark, m'sieurs!"

Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause, a
second report. We went forward cautiously across a bridge that spanned
an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with broken
windows, from which no sign or sound of life came. Suddenly at a turn
three German privates of a lancer regiment faced us. They were burdened
with bottles of