Looking back on it I can recall just one woman I saw in France who maintained an unquenchable blitheness of spirit.  She was the little woman who managed the small cafe in Maubeuge where we ate our meals.  Perhaps her frugal French mind rejoiced that business remained so good, for many officers dined at her table and, by Continental standards, paid her well and abundantly for what she fed them; but I think a better reason lay in the fact that she had within her an innate buoyancy which nothing—­not even war—­could daunt.

She was one of those women who remain trig and chic though they be slovens by instinct.  Her blouse was never clean, but she wore it with an air.  Her skirt testified that skillets spit grease; but in it she somehow looked as trim as a trout fly.  Even the hole in her stocking gave her piquancy; and she had wonderful black hair, which probably had not been combed properly for a month, and big, crackling black eyes.  They told us that one day, a week or two before we came, she had been particularly cheerful—­so cheerful that one of her patrons was moved to inquire the cause of it.

“Oh,” she said, “I am quite content with life to-day.  I have word that my husband is a prisoner.  Now he is out of danger and you Germans will have to feed him—­and he is a great eater!  If you starve him then I shall starve you.”

At breakfast Captain Mannesmann, who was with us, asked her in his best French for more butter.  She paused in her quick, bird-like movements—­ for she was waitress, cook, cashier, manager and owner, all rolled into one—­and cocking a saucy, unkempt head at him asked that the question be repeated.  This time, in his efforts to be understood, he stretched his words out so that unwittingly his voice took on rather a whining tone.

“Well, don’t cry about it!” she snapped.  “I’ll see what I can do.”

Returning from the battle front our itinerary included a long stretch of the great road that runs between Paris and Brussels, a road much favored formerly by auto tourists, but now used almost altogether for military purposes.  Considering that we traversed a corner of the stage of one of the greatest battles thus far waged—­Mons—­and that this battle had taken place but a few weeks before, there were remarkably few evidences remaining of it.

With added force we remarked a condition that had given us material for wonderment in our earlier journeyings.  Though a retreating army and an advancing army, both enormous in size, had lately poured through the country, the houses, the farms and the towns were almost undamaged.

Certain contrasts which took on a heightened emphasis by reason of their brutal abruptness, abounded all over Belgium.  You passed at a step, as it were, from a district of complete and irreparable destruction to one wherein all things were orderly and ordered, and much as they should be in peaceful times.  Were it not for the stagnated towns and the depression that berode the people, one would hardly know these areas had lately been overrun by hostile soldiers and now groaned under enormous tithes.  In isolated instances the depression had begun to lift.  Certain breeds of the polyglot Flemish race have, it appears, an almost unkillable resilience of temper; but in a town a mile away all those whom we met would be like dead people who walked.