n place. I
only know it was there, and being there it seemed to me to sum up the
fate of little Belgium in this great war. If I had been seeking a
visible symbol of Belgium's case I do not believe I could have found a
more fitting one anywhere.

Going down the hill to the town we met, skirting across our path, a
party of natives wearing Red Cross distinguishments. The lieutenant
said these men had undoubtedly been beating the woods and grain fields
for the scattered wounded or dead. He added, without emotion, that from
time to time they found one such; in fact, the volunteer searchers had
brought in two Frenchmen just before we arrived--one to be cared for at
the hospital, the other to be buried.

We had thanked the young lieutenant and had bade him good-by, and were
starting off again, hoping to make Maubeuge before night, when suddenly
it struck me that the one thing about La Buissiere I should recall most
vividly was not the sight of it, all stricken and stunned and forlorn as
it was, but the stench of it.

Before this my eyes had been so busy recording impressions that my nose
had neglected its duty; now for the first time I sensed the vile reek
that arose from all about me. The place was one big, horrid stink. It
smelled of ether and iodoform and carbolic acid--there being any number
of improvised hospitals, full of wounded, in sight; it smelled of sour
beef bones and stale bread and moldy hay and fresh horse dung; it
smelled of the sweaty bodies of the soldiers; it smelled of everything
that is fetid and rancid and unsavory and unwholesome.

And yet, forty-eight hours before, this town, if it was like every other
Belgian town, must have been as clean as clean could be. When the
Belgian peasant housewife has cleaned the inside of her house she issues
forth with bucket and scrubbing brush and washes the outside of it--and
even the pavement in front and the cobbles of the road. But the war had
come to La Buissiere and turned it upside down.

A war wastes towns, it seems, even more visibly than it wastes nations.
Already the streets were ankle-deep in filth. There were broken lamps
and broken bottles and broken windowpanes everywhere, and one could not
step without an accompaniment of crunching glass from underfoot.

Sacks of provender, which the French had abandoned, were split open and
their contents wasted in the mire while the inhabitants went hungry.
The lower floors of the houses were bedded in str