Pretty soon the mare grew so weary
she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were, we
who rode dismounted and trudged on, taking turns at dragging her forward
by the bit. I presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more, along an
interminable straight road and past miles of the checkered light and
dark green fields which in harvest time make a great backgammon board of
this whole country of Belgium.

The road was empty of natives--empty, too, of German wagon trains; and
these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been
hardly a minute of the day when we were not passing soldiers or meeting
refugees.

Almost without warning we came on this little village called Montignies
St. Christophe. A six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its name
--a rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty
houses, all told. But now tragedy had given it distinction; had painted
that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture
of it is going to live in my memory as long as I do live. At the upper
end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old chateau, the
seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park of beeches and
elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first
intimation that there had been a fight. The gate stood ajar between its
chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French cavalry
officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar
and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree. Beneath the tree were a
sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire;
and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all
ready for the pot or the pan. Looking on past these things we saw much
scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards,
fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with
slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their
tops--which proved them to be French canteens--tumbled straw, odd shoes
with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all
the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.

As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
clumped trees of the chateau grounds. We were desperately weary, to
begin with, and our eyes, those past thre