ching a boy
who was drawing.

He had a supply of coloured crayons, and the walls as high as he could
reach were almost covered. There were priests, soldier types,
caricatures of the German Emperor, the arms of France and Belgium--I
do not remember what all. And it was exceedingly well done. The boy
was an artist to his finger tips.

At a clever caricature of the German Emperor the soldiers laughed and
clapped their hands. While they were laughing I looked through an open
door.

Three men lay on cots in an inner room--rather, two men and a boy. I
went in.

One of the men was shot through the spine and paralysed. The second
one had a bullet in his neck, and his face already bore the dark flush
and anxious look of general infection. The boy smiled.

They had been there since the day before, waiting for a locomotive to
come and move the hospital train that waited outside. In that railway
station the boy had had his leg taken off at the knee.

They lay there, quite alone. The few women were feeding starving men.
Now and then one would look in to see if there was any change. There
was nothing to be done. They lay there, and the shells burst
incessantly a mile away, and the men in the next room laughed and
applauded at some happy stroke of the young artist.

"I am so sorry," I said to the boy. The others had not roused at my
entrance, but he had looked at me with quick, intelligent eyes.

"It is nothing!" was his reply.

Outside, in the village, soldiers thronged the streets. The sun was
shining with the first promise of spring. In an area way regimental
butchering was going on, and a great sow, escaping, ran frenzied down
the street, followed by a throng of laughing, shouting men. And still
the shells fell, across a few fields, and inside the station the three
men lay and waited.

That evening at dusk the bombardment ceased, and I went through the
shelled town. It was difficult to get about. Walls had fallen across
the way, interiors that had been homes gaped open to the streets.
Shattered beds and furnishings lay about--kitchen utensils, broken
dishes. On some of the walls holy pictures still hung, grouped about a
crucifix. There are many to tell how the crucifix has escaped in the
wholesale destruction of towns.

A shoemaker had come back into the village for the night, and had
opened his shop. For a time he seemed to be the only inhabitant of
what I had known, a short time before, as a prosperous and thrivin