At a clever caricature of the German Emperor the soldiers laughed and clapped their hands.  While they were laughing I looked through an open door.

Three men lay on cots in an inner room—­rather, two men and a boy.  I went in.

One of the men was shot through the spine and paralysed.  The second one had a bullet in his neck, and his face already bore the dark flush and anxious look of general infection.  The boy smiled.

They had been there since the day before, waiting for a locomotive to come and move the hospital train that waited outside.  In that railway station the boy had had his leg taken off at the knee.

They lay there, quite alone.  The few women were feeding starving men.  Now and then one would look in to see if there was any change.  There was nothing to be done.  They lay there, and the shells burst incessantly a mile away, and the men in the next room laughed and applauded at some happy stroke of the young artist.

“I am so sorry,” I said to the boy.  The others had not roused at my entrance, but he had looked at me with quick, intelligent eyes.

“It is nothing!” was his reply.

Outside, in the village, soldiers thronged the streets.  The sun was shining with the first promise of spring.  In an area way regimental butchering was going on, and a great sow, escaping, ran frenzied down the street, followed by a throng of laughing, shouting men.  And still the shells fell, across a few fields, and inside the station the three men lay and waited.

That evening at dusk the bombardment ceased, and I went through the shelled town.  It was difficult to get about.  Walls had fallen across the way, interiors that had been homes gaped open to the streets.  Shattered beds and furnishings lay about—­kitchen utensils, broken dishes.  On some of the walls holy pictures still hung, grouped about a crucifix.  There are many to tell how the crucifix has escaped in the wholesale destruction of towns.

A shoemaker had come back into the village for the night, and had opened his shop.  For a time he seemed to be the only inhabitant of what I had known, a short time before, as a prosperous and thriving market town.  Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw three women sitting round a candle.  And in the next street I found a man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel.

He explained that he had closed up a small cellar-way.  His family had no place else to go and were coming in from the fields, where they had sought safety, to sleep in the cellar for the night.  He was leaving a small aperture, to be closed with bags of sand, so that if the house was destroyed over them in the night they could crawl out and escape.

He knelt on the bricks in front of the house, a patient, resigned figure, playing no politics, interested not at all in war and diplomacy, in a way to the sea or to a place in the sun—­one of the millions who must adapt themselves to new and fearsome situations and do their best.