her--and the father must have
been an old man, for the speaker himself was in his fifties--had been
shot through the thigh. But had anybody been killed? That was what we
wanted to know. Ah, but yes! A dozen eager fingers pointed to the house
immediately behind us. There a man had been killed.

Coming back to try to save some of their belongings after the Germans
had gone through, these others had found him at the head of the cellar
steps in his blazing house. His throat had been cut and his blood was on
the floor, and he was dead. They led us into the shell of the place,
the stone walls being still staunchly erect; but the roof was gone, and
in the cinders and dust on the planks of an inner room they showed us a
big dull-brown smear.

This, they told us, pointing, was the place where he lay. One man in
pantomime acted out the drama of the discovery of the body. He was a
born actor, that Belgian villager, and an orator--with his hands.
Somehow, watching him, I visualized the victim as a little man, old and
stoop-shouldered and feeble in his movements.

I looked about the room. The corner toward the road was a black ruin,
but the back wall was hardly touched by the marks of the fire.

On a mantel small bits of pottery stood intact, and a holy picture on
the wall--a cheap print of a saint--was not even singed. At the foot of
the cellar steps curdled milk stood in pans; and beside the milk, on a
table, was a half-moon of cheese and a long knife.

We wanted to know why the man who lived here had been killed. They
professed ignorance then--none of them knew, or, at least, none of them
would say. A little later a woman told us she had heard the Germans
caught him watching from a window with a pair of opera glasses, and on
this evidence took him for a spy. But we could secure no direct
evidence either to confirm the tale or to disprove it.

We got to the center of the town, leaving the venerable nag behind to be
baited at a big gray barn by a big, shapeless, kindly woman hostler
whose wooden shoes clattered on the round cobbles of her stable yard
like drum taps.

In the Square, after many citizens had informed us there was nothing to
eat, a little Frenchwoman took pity on our emptiness, and, leading us to
a parlor behind a shop where she sold, among other things, post cards,
cheeses and underwear, she made us a huge omelet and gave us also good
butter and fresh milk and a pot of her homemade marmalade. Her tw