Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man’s face had been partly shot or shorn away—­the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an abominable thing to look on.  These two had been men the day before.  Now they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected sugar beets.

We stopped and watched.  The wagon bumped through the beet patch to where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug.  The diggers were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a painting by Millet.  Their spades were speared upright into the mound of fresh earth.  Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky line.

We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon.  We saw them slide into the shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in the hole.

Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us.  There was one detached house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the field where the burial took place.  It had a shield on its front wall bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs house.

A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French boundary came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road.  Had the gravediggers picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.

The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise through the elm-tree aisles along our route.  Just as it disappeared we met a string of refugees—­men, women and children—­all afoot, all bearing pitiably small bundles.  They limped along silently in a straggling procession.  None of them was weeping; none of them apparently had been weeping.  During the past ten days I had seen thousands of such refugees, and I had yet to hear one of them cry out or complain or protest.

These who passed us now were like that.  Their heavy peasant faces expressed dumb bewilderment—­nothing else.  They went on up the road into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound of their clunking tread died out behind us.  Without knowing certainly, we nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of Montignies St. Christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.

An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp and entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a German army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main force of the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well beyond the frontier.  France was invaded.

Chapter 2