One of us said we should like to have a look at a man who had undergone such an entombment.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said the captain; “for he is no very pleasant sight.  He is a slobbering idiot.”

In the Grand Place, near the shell-riddled Church of Notre Dame—­built by the Bishops in the thirteenth century, restored by the Belgian Government in the nineteenth, and destroyed by the German guns in the twentieth—­a long queue of women wound past the doorway of a building where German noncommissioned officers handed out to each applicant a big loaf of black soldier bread.

“Oh, yes; we feed the poor devils,” the German commandant, an elderly, scholarly looking man of the rank of major, said to us when he had come up to be introduced.  “When our troops entered this town the men of the lower classes took up arms and fired at our soldiers; so the soldiers burned all their houses and shot all the men who came out of those houses.

“All this occurred before I was sent here.  Had I been the commander of the troops, I should have shot them without mercy.  It is our law for war times, and these Belgian civilians must be taught that they cannot fire on German soldiers and not pay for it with their lives and their homes.  With the women and children, however, the case is different.  On my own responsibility I am feeding the destitute.  Every day I give away to these people between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred loaves of bread; and I give to some who are particularly needy rations of tea and sugar and coffee and rice.  Also, I sell to the butcher shops fresh and salt meat from our military stores at cost, requiring only that they, in turn, shall sell it at no more than a fair profit.  So long as I am stationed here I shall do this, for I cannot let them starve before my eyes.  I myself have children.”

It was like escaping from a pesthouse to cross the one bridge of Dinant that remained standing on its piers, and go winding down the lovely valley, overtaking and passing many German wagon trains, the stout, middle-aged soldier drivers of which drowsed on their seats; passing also one marching battalion of foot-reserves, who, their officers concurring, broke from the ranks to beg newspapers and cigars from us.  On the mountain ash the bright red berries dangled in clumps like Christmas bells, and some of the leaves of the elm still clung to their boughs; so that the wide yellow road was dappled like a wild-cat’s back with black splotches of shadow.  Only when we curved through some village that had been the scene of a skirmish or a reprisal did the roofless shells and the toppled walls of the houses, standing gaunt and ugly in the sharp sunlight, make us realize that we were still in the war tracks.