The trains which were expected had not begun to arrive yet, so with two companions I sat on a bench at the back of the station, waiting.  Facing us was a line of houses.  One, the corner house, was a big black char.  It had caught fire during the shelling and burned quite down.  Its neighbors were intact, except for shattered chimneys and smashed doors and riddled windows.  The concussion of a big gunfire had shivered every window in this quarter of town.  There being no sufficient stock of glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing in fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched the holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near by.  Of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum them up:  Few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there was any fresh glass to buy, and the local glaziers—­such of them as survived—­would be serving the colors.  All France had gone to war and at this time of writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams of wounded and prisoners.

These ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through narrow eye slits.  The railroad station was windowless, too, like all the buildings round about, but nobody had closed the openings here, and it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a North European fall searched through it.

In this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen.  Even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them.  A hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick and crane were hoisting captured French field guns upon flat cars to be taken to Berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of the stay-at-homes.  A row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation.  Except for the agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the place where we sat was pretty quiet.  There were a million flies, and there seemed to be a billion.  You wouldn’t have thought, unless you had been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the world.  By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin.  Even after a night of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday—­as thick and as clinging and as nasty.  Go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.

As I sit and look back on what I myself have seen of it, this war seems to me to have been not so much a sight as a stench.  Everything which makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed.  What it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is a vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.