ry one of them had a tale to tell of German atrocities
on noncombatants; but not once did we find an avowed eye-witness to such
things. Always our informant had heard of the torturing or the maiming
or the murdering, but never had he personally seen it. It had always
happened in another town--never in his own town.

We hoped to hire fresh vehicles of some sort in Nivelles. Indeed, a
half-drunken burgher who spoke fair English, and who, because he had
once lived in America, insisted on taking personal charge of our
affairs, was constantly bustling in to say he had arranged for carriages
and horses; but when the starting hour came--at five o'clock on Monday
morning--there was no sign either of our fuddled guardian or of the rigs
he had promised. So we set out afoot, following the everlasting sound
of the guns.

After having many small adventures on the way we came at nightfall to
Binche, a town given over to dullness and lacemaking, and once a year to
a masked carnival, but which now was jammed with German supply trains,
and by token of this latter circumstance filled with apprehensive
townspeople. But there had been no show of resistance here, and no
houses had been burned; and the Germans were paying freely for what they
took and treating the townspeople civilly.

Indeed, all that day we had traveled through a district as yet unharried
and unmolested. Though sundry hundreds of thousands of Germans had gone
that way, no burnt houses or squandered fields marked their wake; and
the few peasants who had not run away at the approach of the dreaded
Allemands were back at work, trying to gather their crops in barrows or
on their backs, since they had no work-cattle left. For these the
Germans had taken from them, to the last fit horse and the last colt.

At Binche we laid up two nights and a day for the curing of our
blistered feet. Also, here we bought our two flimsy bicycles and our
decrepit dogcart, and our still more decrepit mare to haul it; and, with
this equipment, on Wednesday morning, bright and early, we made a fresh
start, heading now toward Maubeuge, across the French boundary.

Current rumor among the soldiers at Binche--for the natives, seemingly
through fear for their own skins, would tell us nothing--was that at
Maubeuge the onward-pressing Germans had caught up with the withdrawing
columns of the Allies and were trying to bottle the stubborn English
rear guard. For once the gossip of the privates a