I was taken in an automobile from Dunkirk to the Belgian Army Headquarters, where an officer of the headquarters staff, Captain F——­, took charge.  The headquarters had been a brewery.

Stripped of the impedimenta of its previous occupation, it now housed the officers of the staff.

Since that time I have frequently visited the headquarters staffs of various armies or their divisions.  I became familiar with the long, bare tables stacked with papers, the lamps, the maps on the walls, the telephones, the coming and going of dispatch riders in black leather.  I came to know something of the chafing restlessness of these men who must sit, well behind the firing line, and play paper battles on which lives and empires hang.

But one thing never ceased to puzzle me.

That night, in a small kitchen behind the Belgian headquarters rooms, a French peasant woman was cooking the evening meal.  Always, at all the headquarters that were near the front, somewhere in a back room was a resigned-looking peasant woman cooking a meal.  Children hung about the stove or stood in corners looking out at the strange new life that surrounded them.  Peasants too old for war, their occupations gone, sat listlessly with hanging hands, their faces the faces of bewildered children; their clean floors were tracked by the muddy boots of soldiers; their orderly lives disturbed, uprooted; their once tidy farmyards were filled with transports; their barns with army horses; their windmills, instead of housing sacks of grain, were occupied by mitrailleuses.

What were the thoughts of these people?  What are they thinking now?—­for they are still there.  What does it all mean to them?  Do they ever glance at the moving cord of the war map on the wall?  Is this war to them only a matter of a courtyard or a windmill?  Of mud and the upheaval of quiet lives?  They appear to be waiting—­for spring, probably, and the end of hostilities; for spring and the planting of crops, for quiet nights to sleep and days to labour.

The young men are always at the front.  They who are left express confidence that these their sons and husbands will return.  And yet in the spring many of them ploughed shallow over battlefields.

It had been planned to show me first a detail map of the places I was to visit, and with this map before me to explain the present position of the Belgian line along the embankment of the railroad from Nieuport to Dixmude.  The map was ready on a table in the officers’ mess, a bare room with three long tables of planks, to which a flight of half a dozen steps led from the headquarters room below.

Twilight had fallen by that time.  It had commenced to rain.  I could see through the window heavy drops that stirred the green surface of the moat at one side of the old building.  On the wall hung the advertisement of an American harvester, a reminder of more peaceful days.  The beating of the rain kept time to the story Captain F——­ told that night, bending over the map and tracing his country’s ruin with his forefinger.