Quite casually our hostess showed us a round hole in the window behind us, a big white scar in the wooden inner shutter and a flattened chunk of lead.  The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown, had fired a bullet through the window of her house.  It was proof of the rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident quietly.  Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a stray bullet or two through her back window?  So we interpreted her attitude.

It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at Merbes-le-Chateau, but to go off at an angle to La Buissiere, where she had heard one bridge still stood.  She said nothing of a fight at that place.  It is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two towns almost touched.  Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the people so concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that they seemed not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or two miles away had fared.

Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissiere to find the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also, and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on which we stumbled.

Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which, after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and might become a pestilence.  When we told them we meant to enter La Buissiere they held up their soiled hands in protest.

“There has been much fighting there,” one said, “and many are dead, and more are dying.  Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are full of Germans.  Hark, m’sieurs!”

Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause, a second report.  We went forward cautiously across a bridge that spanned an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with broken windows, from which no sign or sound of life came.  Suddenly at a turn three German privates of a lancer regiment faced us.  They were burdened with bottles of beer, and one carried his lance, which he flung playfully in our path.  He had been drinking and was jovially exhilarated.  As soon as he saw the small silk American flag that fluttered from the rail of our dogcart he and his friends became enthusiastic in their greetings, offering us beer and wanting to know whether the Americans meant to declare for Germany now that the Japanese had sided with England.

Leaving them cheering for the Americans we negotiated another elbow in the twisting street—­and there all about us was the aftermath and wreckage of a spirited fight.

Earlier in this chapter I told—­or tried to tell—­how La Buissiere must have looked in peaceful times.  I shall try now to tell how it actually looked that afternoon we rode into it.