I had seen perhaps a hundred thousand head of horses, drawing cannon and wagons, and serving as mounts for officers in the first drive of the Germans toward Paris, and had marveled at the uniformly prime condition of the teams.  Presumably these sorry crow-baits, which drooped and limped about the barren railroad yards at the back of the siding where the shell loaders squatted, had been whole-skinned and sound of wind and joint in early August.

Two months of service had turned them into gaunt wrecks.  Their ribs stuck through their hollow sides.  Their hoofs were broken; their hocks were swelled enormously; and, worst of all, there were great raw wounds on their shoulders and backs, where the collars and saddles had worn through hide and flesh to the bones.  From that time on, the numbers of mistreated, worn-out horses we encountered in transit back from the front increased steadily.  Finally we ceased to notice them at all.

I should explain that the description I have given of the prevalent idleness along the Meuse applied to the towns and to the scattered workingmen’s villages that flanked all or nearly all the outlying and comparatively isolated factories.  In the fields and the truck patches the farming folks—­women and old men usually, with here and there children—­bestirred themselves to get the moldered and mildewed remnants of their summer-ripened crops under cover before the hard frost came.

Invariably we found this state of affairs to exist wherever we went in the districts of France and of Belgium that had been fought over and which were now occupied by the Germans.  Woodlands and cleared places, where engagements had taken place, would, within a month or six weeks thereafter, show astonishingly few traces of the violence and death that had violated the peace of the countryside.  New grass would be growing in the wheel ruts of the guns and on the sides of the trenches in which infantry had screened itself.  As though they took pattern by the example of Nature, the peasants would be afield, gathering what remained of their harvests—­even plowing and harrowing the ground for new sowing.  On the very edge of the battle front we saw them so engaged, seemingly paying less heed to the danger of chance shell-fire than did the soldiers who passed and repassed where they toiled.

In the towns almost always the situation was different.  The people who lived in those towns seemed like so many victims of a universal torpor.  They had lost even their sense of inborn curiosity regarding the passing stranger.  Probably from force of habit, the shopkeepers stayed behind their counters; but between them and the few customers who came there was little of the vivacious chatter one has learned to associate with dealings among the dwellers in most Continental communities.  We passed through village after village and town after town, to find in each the same picture—­men and women in mute clusters about the doorways and in the little squares, who barely turned their heads as the automobile flashed by.  Once in a while we caught the sound of a brisker tread on the cobbled street; but when we looked, nine times in ten we saw that the walker was a soldier of the German garrison quartered there to keep the population quiet and to help hold the line of communication.