ith agonized
udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no
dogs. We already had remarked this fact--that in every desolated
village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-
looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters. And it
was so in Montignies St. Christophe.

On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.

It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind
the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the
town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at
us through a break in the wall. He called out to her in French, but she
never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter. He
started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.

Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon--a furniture dealer's
wagon--from some larger community, which had been impressed by the
Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service. A jaded
team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their
centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft. One man led the near
horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon. All three
of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.

The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends. Overhauling it
we saw that it contained two dead soldiers--French foot-soldiers. The
bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed. Their feet somehow were
caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red
pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about
to glide backward and out of the wagon.

The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc,
encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles
these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly. The other's head was
canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face. It
was a young face--we could tell that much, even through the mask of
caked mud on the drab-white skin--and it might once have been a comely
face. It was not comely now.

Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had