for varying periods. From others
all the furniture had been taken away and shipped back to Germany. One
man showed us a card which he had found in the frame of one of his best
pictures. It was the card of a German officer, and under the name was
written an order to send the picture to a certain address in Berlin. The
picture was gone, but the frame and card were still there and are being
kept against the day of reckoning--if any. We were shown several little
safes which had been pried open and looted, and were told the usual set
of stories of what had happened when the army went through. Some of the
things would be hard to believe if one did not hear them from the lips
of people who are reliable and who live in such widely separated parts
of the country at a time when communications are almost impossible.

We had a good and ingeniously arranged dinner. All sorts of ordinary
foods are not to be had in this part of the country, and our hostess
had, by able thinking, arranged a meal which skillfully concealed the
things that were lacking. Among other things, I observed that we had a
series of most delicious wines--for our host of that evening also had a
wonderful cellar. They had told us just before dinner that the Germans
had taken an inventory of their wines and had forbidden them to touch
another drop, so I wondered whether they were not incurring some risk in
order to give us the wine that they considered indispensable. When I
asked our hostess, she told me that it was very simple, that all they
needed to do was to drink a part of several bottles, refill them
partially with water, seal them, and put them back in the cellars; she
said scornfully that "_les Boches_ don't know one wine from another,"
and had not yet been able to detect the fraud. They had a lot of cheap
champagne in the cellar and had been filling them up with that, as they
prefer any champagne to the best vintage Burgundies. Once in a while
there is a little satisfaction reserved for a Belgian.

We were called at daybreak and were on the road at eight o'clock, taking
in a series of small villages which had been destroyed, and talking with
the few people to be found about the place. This part of Belgium is far
worse than the northern part, where the people can get away with
comparative ease to one of the larger towns and come back now and then
to look after their crops. Here one village after another is wiped out,
and the peasants have no place to go unl