beer, and one carried his lance, which he flung
playfully in our path. He had been drinking and was jovially
exhilarated. As soon as he saw the small silk American flag that
fluttered from the rail of our dogcart he and his friends became
enthusiastic in their greetings, offering us beer and wanting to know
whether the Americans meant to declare for Germany now that the Japanese
had sided with England.

Leaving them cheering for the Americans we negotiated another elbow in
the twisting street--and there all about us was the aftermath and
wreckage of a spirited fight.

Earlier in this chapter I told--or tried to tell--how La Buissiere must
have looked in peaceful times. I shall try now to tell how it actually
looked that afternoon we rode into it.

In the center of the town the main street opens out to form an irregular
circle, and the houses fronting it make a compact ring. Through a gap
one gets a glimpse of the little river which one has just crossed; and
on the river bank stands the mill, or what is left of it, and that is
little enough. Its roof is gone, shot clear away in a shower of
shattered tiling, and its walls are breached in a hundred places. It is
pretty certain that mill will never grind grist again.

On its upper floor, which is now a sieve, the Germans--so they
themselves told us--found, after the fighting, the seventy-year-old
miller, dead, with a gun in his hands and a hole in his head. He had
elected to help the French defend the place; and it was as well for him
that he fell fighting, because, had he been taken alive, the Prussians,
following their grim rule for all civilians caught with weapons, would
have stood him up against a wall with a firing squad before him.

The houses round about have fared better, in the main, than the mill,
though none of them has come scatheless out of the fight. Hardly a
windowpane is whole; hardly a wall but is pocked by bullets or rent by
larger missiles. Some houses have lost roofs; some have lost side
walls, so that one can gaze straight into them and see the cluttered
furnishings, half buried in shattered masonry and crumbled plaster.

One small cottage has been blown clear away in a blast of artillery
fire; only the chimney remains, pointing upward like a stubby finger. A
fireplace, with a fire in it, is the glowing heart of a house; and a
chimney completes it and reveals that it is a home fit for human
creatures to live in; but we see here--and th