nd the noncommissioned
officers proved to be true. There was fighting that day near Maubeuge--
hard fighting and plenty of it; but, though we got within five miles of
it, and heard the guns and saw the smoke from them, we were destined not
to get there.

Strung out, with the bicycles in front, we went down the straight white
road that ran toward the frontier. After an hour or two of steady going
we began to notice signs of the retreat that had trailed through this
section forty-eight hours before. We picked up a torn shoulder strap,
evidently of French workmanship, which had 13 embroidered on it in faded
red tape; and we found, behind the trunk of a tree, a knapsack, new but
empty, which was too light to have been part of a German soldier's
equipment.

We thought it was French; but now I think it must have been Belgian,
because, as we subsequently discovered, a few scattering detachments of
the Belgian foot soldiers who fled from Brussels on the eve of the
occupation--disappearing so completely and so magically--made their way
westward and southward to the French lines, toward Mons, and enrolled
with the Allies in the last desperate effort to dam off and stem back
the German torrent.

Also, in a hedge, was a pair of new shoes, with their mouths gaping open
and their latchets hanging down like tongues, as though hungering for
feet to go into them. But not a shred or scrap of German belongings--
barring only the empty bottles--did we see.

The marvelous German system, which is made up of a million small things
to form one great, complete thing, ordained that never, either when
marching or after camping, or even after fighting, should any object,
however worthless, be discarded, lest it give to hostile eyes some hint
as to the name of the command or the extent of its size. These Germans
we were trailing cleaned up behind themselves as carefully as New
England housewives.

It may have been the German love of order and regularity that induced
them even to avoid trampling the ripe grain in the fields wherever
possible. Certainly, except when dealing out punishment, they did
remarkably little damage, considering their numbers, along their line of
march through this lowermost strip of Belgium.

At Merbes-Ste.-Marie, a matter of six kilometers from Binche, we came on
the first proof of seeming wantonness we encountered that day. An old
woman sat in a doorway of what had been a wayside wine shop, guarding
the pitia