elgium--The Rag Doll of Europe .
XVI. Louvain the Forsaken.
Chapter 1
A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe
We passed through it late in the afternoon--this little Belgian town
called Montignies St. Christophe--just twenty-four hours behind a dust-
colored German column. I am going to try now to tell how it looked to
us.
I am inclined to think I passed this way a year before, or a little
less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that. Traveling 'cross
country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked
when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.
Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not pass, through this little
town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through fifty
like it--each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord,
along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each
with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking trough, its
priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings
of saber and belt and shoulder straps.
I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the
shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking
vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time
I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.
But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it
out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other
unimportant villages in this upper left-hand corner of the map of
Europe. The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a
side-slap.
We came to it just before dusk. All day we had been hurrying along,
trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved
faster than we did, even though they fought as they went. They had gone
round the southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it
in with tight bands of steel. Belgium--or this part of it--was all
barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already
across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.
Besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear.
There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Chateau, where the English had
been; and the hour we spent at La Buissiere, on the river Sambre, where
a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Chateau is
another story and so
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