children mostly.  In nearly every one of these faces a sort of cow-like bewilderment expresses itself—­not grief, not even resentment, but merely a stupefied wonderment at the astounding fact that their town, rather than some other town, should be the town where the soldiers of other nations come to fight out their feud.  We have come to know well that look these last few days.  So far as we have seen there has been no mistreatment of civilians by the soldiers; yet we note that the villagers stay inside the shelter of their damaged homes as though they felt safer there.  A young officer bustles up, spick and span in his tan boots and tan gloves, and, finding us to be Americans and correspondents, becomes instantly effusive.  He has just come through his first fight, seemingly with some credit to himself; and he is proud of the part he has played and is pleased to talk about it.  Of his own accord he volunteers to lead us to the heights back of the town where the French defenses were and where the hand-to-hand fighting took place.

As we trail along behind him in single file we pass a small paved court before a stable and see a squad of French prisoners.  Later we are to see several thousand French prisoners; but now the sight is at once a sensation and a novelty to us.  These are all French prisoners; there are no Belgians or Englishmen among them.  In their long, cumbersome blue coats and baggy red pants they are huddled down against a wall in a heap of straw.  They lie there silently, chewing straws and looking very forlorn.  Four German soldiers with fixed bayonets are guarding them.

The young lieutenant leads us along a steeply ascending road over a ridge and then stops; and as we look about us the consciousness strikes home to us, with almost the jar of a physical blow, that we are standing where men have lately striven together and have fallen and died.

In front of us and below us is the town, with the river winding into it at the east and out of it at the west; and beyond the town, to the north, is the cup-shaped valley of fair, fat farm lands, all heavy and pregnant with un-garnered, ungathered crops.  Behind us, on the front of the hill, is a hedge, and beyond the hedge—­just a foot or so back of it, in fact—­is a deep trench, plainly dug out by hand, and so lately done that the cut clods are still moist and fresh-looking.  At the first instant of looking it seems to us that this intrenchment is full of dead men; but when we look closer we see that what we take for corpses are the scattered garments and equipments of French infantrymen—­long blue coats; peaked, red-topped caps; spare shirts; rifled knapsacks; water-bottles; broken guns; side arms; bayonet belts and blanket rolls.  There are perhaps twenty guns in sight.  Each one has been rendered useless by being struck against the earth with sufficient force to snap the stock at the grip.