Then, while seated on a battered wall, Ridden poured out his story of the last two months of hardships and horrors.  It was the single individual’s share in the terrific gruelling that the Belgian army had received while it was beaten back from the eastern frontier to its stand on the river Scheldt.  Always being promised aid by the Allies if they would hold out just a little longer, they were led again and again frantically to pit their puny strength against the overwhelming tide out of the North.  For the moment they would stay it.  Eagerly they would listen for sounds of approaching help, asking every stranger when it was coming.  It never came.  From position to position they fell back, stubbornly fighting, a flaming pillar of sparks and clouds of smoke marking the path of their retreat.

Though smashed and broken that army was never crushed.  Its spirit was incarnate in this cheerful and undaunted Ridden.  He recounted his privations as nonchalantly as if it was just the way that he had planned to spend his holiday.  As a farewell token he presented me with an epaulet from an officer he had killed, and a pin from a German woman spy he had captured.

“Be sure to visit me when you get back to America,” I cried out down the street to him.

He stood waving his hand in farewell as in greeting, the same happy ingenuous look upon his face and sending after me in reply the same old confident standby, “You betcha.”  But I do not cherish a great hope of ever seeing Ridden again.  The chances are that, like most of the Belgian army, he is no longer treading the gray streets of those demolished cities, but whatever golden streets there may be in the City Celestial.  War is race suicide.  It kills the best and leaves behind the undermuscled and the under-brained to propagate the species.

Striking farther into the heart of the ruins, we beheld in a section all burned and shattered to the ground a building which stood straight up like a cliff intact and undamaged amidst the general wreckage.  As we stumbled over the debris, imagine our surprise when an old lady of about seventy thrust her head out of a basement window.  She was the owner of the house, and while the city had been the fighting ground for the armies she had, through it all, bravely stuck to her home.

“I was born here, I have always lived here, and I am going to die here,” she said, with a look of pride upon her kindly face.

Madame Callebaut-Ringoot was her name.  During the bombardment of the town she had retired to the cellar; but when the Germans entered to burn the city she stood there at the door watching the flames rolling up from the warehouses and factories in the distance.  Nearer and nearer came the billowing tide of fire.  A fountain of sparks shooting up from a house a few hundred yards away marked the advance of the firing squad into her street, but she never wavered.  Down the street came the spoilers, relentless, ruthless, and remorseless, sparing nothing.  They came like priests of the nether world, anointing each house with oil from the petrol flasks and with a firebrand dedicating it to the flames.  Every one, panic-stricken, fled before them.  Every one but this old lady, who stood there bidding defiance to all the Kaiser’s horses and all the Kaiser’s men.