lining was hardly soiled.  The figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment.  Behind the barn we found a whole pile of new knapsacks—­the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered on the back side with undressed red bullock’s hide.

Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human being.  The place fairly ached with emptiness.  Cats sat on the doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard imprisoned beasts lowing dismally.  Cows were there, with agonized udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no dogs.  We already had remarked this fact—­that in every desolated village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters.  And it was so in Montignies St. Christophe.

On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf—­a breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which the Germans had kicked half down—­I counted three cats, seated side by side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.

It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at us through a break in the wall.  He called out to her in French, but she never answered—­only continued to watch him from behind her shelter.  He started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having spoken a word.  She was the only living person we saw in that town.

Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon—­a furniture dealer’s wagon—­from some larger community, which had been impressed by the Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service.  A jaded team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft.  One man led the near horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon.  All three of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.

The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends.  Overhauling it we saw that it contained two dead soldiers—­French foot-soldiers.  The bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed.  Their feet somehow were caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about to glide backward and out of the wagon.

The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc, encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly.  The other’s head was canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face.  It was a young face—­we could tell that much, even through the mask of caked mud on the drab-white skin—­and it might once have been a comely face.  It was not comely now.