But this war is so big a thing, as wars go, that an engagement of this size is likely to be forgotten in a day or a week.  Yet, I warrant you, the people of La Buissiere will not forget it.  Nor shall we forget it who came that way in the early afternoon of a flawless summer day.  Let me try to recreate La Buissiere for you, reader.  Here the Sambre, a small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and weSt. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond like the rim of a saucer.  The town—­most of it—­is on this side.  On the south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy feet high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau, where trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander between fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar beets.  As for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people—­ Walloons and Flemish folk—­living in tall, bleak, stone houses built flush with the little crooked streets.  Invariably these houses are of a whitish gray color; almost invariably they are narrow and cramped-looking, with very peaky gables, somehow suggesting flat-chested old men standing in close rows, with their hands in their pockets and their shoulders shrugged up.

A canal bisects one corner of the place, and spanning the river there are—­or were—­three bridges, one for the railroad and two for foot and vehicular travel.  There is a mill which overhangs the river—­the biggest building in the town—­and an ancient gray convent, not quite so large as the mill; and, of course, a church.  In most of the houses there are tiny shops on the lower floors, and upstairs are the homes of the people.  On the northern side of the stream every tillable foot of soil is under cultivation.  There are flower beds, and plum and pear trees in the tiny grass plots alongside the more pretentious houses, and the farm lands extend to where the town begins.

This, briefly, is La Buissiere as it looked before the war began—­a little, drowsy settlement of dull, frugal, hard-working, kindly Belgians, minding their own affairs, prospering in their own small way, and having no quarrel with the outside world.  They lived in the only corner of Europe that I know of where serving people decline to accept tips for rendering small services; and in a simple, homely fashion are, I think, the politest, the most courteous, the most accommodating human beings on the face of the earth.

Even their misery did not make them forget their manners, as we found when we came that way, close behind the conquerors.  It was only the refugees, fleeing from their homes or going back to them again, who were too far spent to lift their caps in answer to our hails, and too miserably concerned with their own ruined affairs, or else too afraid of inquisitive strangers, to answer the questions we sometimes put to them.