But a hundred years after this war those other houses will not be shown on picture post-cards.  King Albert and his staff may have spent the night in them, but the next day Von Kluck and his army passed, and those houses that had stood for three hundred years were destroyed.  In the papers you have seen many pictures of the shattered roofs and the streets piled high with fallen walls and lined with gaping cellars over which once houses stood.  The walls can be rebuilt, but what was wasted and which cannot be rebuilt are the labor, the saving, the sacrifices that made those houses not mere walls but homes.  A house may be built in a year or rented overnight; it takes longer than that to make it a home.  The farmers and peasants in Belgium had spent many hours of many days in keeping their homes beautiful, in making their farms self-supporting.  After the work of the day was finished they had planted gardens, had reared fruit-trees, built arbors; under them at mealtime they sat surrounded by those of their own household.  To buy the horse and the cow they had pinched and saved; to make the gardens beautiful and the fields fertile they had sweated and slaved, the women as well as the men; even the watch-dog by day was a beast of burden.

When, in August, I reached Belgium between Brussels and Liege, the whole countryside showed the labor of these peasants.  Unlike the American farmer, they were too poor to buy machines to work for them, and with scythes and sickles in hand they cut the grain; with heavy flails they beat it.  All that you saw on either side of the road that was fertile and beautiful was the result of their hard, unceasing personal effort.  Then the war came, like a cyclone, and in three weeks the labor of many years was wasted.  The fields were torn with shells, the grain was in flames, torches destroyed the villages, by the roadside were the carcasses of the cows that had been killed to feed the invader, and the horses were carried off harnessed to gray gun-carriages.  These were the things you saw on every side, from Brussels to the German border.  The peasants themselves were huddled beneath bridges.  They were like vast camps of gypsies, except that, less fortunate than the gypsy, they had lost what he neither possesses nor desires, a home.  As the enemy advanced the inhabitants of one village would fly for shelter to the next, only by the shells to be whipped farther forward; and so, each hour growing in number, the refugees fled toward Brussels and the coast.  They were an army of tramps, of women and children tramps, sleeping in the open fields, beneath the hayricks seeking shelter from the rain, living on the raw turnips and carrots they had plucked from the deserted vegetable gardens.  The peasants were not the only ones who suffered.  The rich and the noble-born were as unhappy and as homeless.  They had credit, and in the banks they had money, but they could not get at the money; and when a chateau and a farmhouse are in flames, between them there is little choice.