The people who enjoyed the protection of these public testimonials were visible, a few of them.  They were nearly all women and children.  They stood in their shallow doorways as our automobile went by bearing four Americans, two German officers and the orderly of one of the officers—­ for we had picked up a couple of chance passengers in Huy—­and a German chauffeur.  As we interpreted their looks, they had no hate for the Germans.  I take it the weight of their woe was so heavy on them that they had no room in their souls for anything else.

Just beyond Dinant, at Anseremme, a beautiful little village at the mouth of a tiny river, where artists used to come to paint pictures and sick folks to breathe the tonic balsam of the hills, we got rooms for the night in a smart, clean tavern.  Here was quartered a captain of cavalry, who found time—­so brisk was he and so high-spirited—­to welcome us to the best the place afforded, to help set the table for our belated supper, and to keep on terms of jovial yet punctilious amiability with the woman proprietor and her good-looking daughters; also, to require his troopers to pay the women, in salutes and spoken thanks, for every small office performed.

The husband of the older woman and the husband of one of the daughters were then serving the Belgian colors, assuming that they had not been killed or caught; but between them and this German captain a perfect understanding had been arrived at.  When the head of the house fixed the prices she meant to charge us for our accommodations, he spoke up and suggested that the rate was scarcely high enough; and also, since her regular patrons had been driven away at the beginning of the war, he advised us that sizable tips on our leaving would probably be appreciated.

Next morning we rose from a breakfast—­the meat part of it having been furnished from the German commissary—­to find twenty lancers exercising their horses in a lovely little natural arena, walled by hills, just below the small eminence whereon the house stood.  It was like a scene from a Wild West exhibition at home, except that these German horsemen lacked the dash of our cowpunchers.  Watching the show from a back garden, we stood waist deep in flowers, and the captain’s orderly, when he came to tell us our automobile was ready, had a huge peony stuck in a buttonhole of his blouse.  I caught a peep at another soldier, who was flirting with a personable Flemish scullery maid behind the protection of the kitchen wall.  The proprietress and her daughters stood at the door to wave us good-by and to wish us, with apparent sincerity, a safe journey down into France, and a safe return.

To drop from this cozy, peaceful place into the town of Dinant again was to drop from a small earthly paradise into a small earthly hell.  Somewhere near the middle of the little perdition our cavalry captain pointed to a shell of a house.

“A fortnight ago,” he told us, “we found a French soldier in that house —­or under it, rather.  He had been there four weeks, hiding in the basement.  He took some food with him or found some there; at any rate, he managed to live four weeks.  He was blind, and nearly deaf, too, when we found out where he was and dug him out—­but he is still alive.”