I regretted this.  So many of the churches are old and have the interest of extreme age, even when they are architecturally insignificant.  But I found these officers very fair, just as I had found the King of the Belgians disinclined to condemn the entire German Army for the brutalities of a part of it.

“There is no reason why churches should not be destroyed if they are serving military purposes,” one of them said.  “When a church tower shelters a gun, or is used for observations, it is quite legitimate that it be subject to artillery fire.  That is a necessity of war.”

We moved cautiously.  Behind the church was a tiny cluster of small houses.  The rain had ceased, but the electric flashlight showed great pools of water, through which we were obliged to walk.  The hamlet was very silent—­not a dog barked.  There were no dogs.

I do not recall seeing any dogs at any time along the front, except at La Panne.  What has become of them?  There were cats in the destroyed towns, cats even in the trenches.  But there were no dogs.  It is not because the people are not fond of dogs.  Dunkirk was full of them when I was there.  The public square resounded with their quarrels and noisy playing.  They lay there in the sun and slept, and ambulances turned aside in their headlong career to avoid running them down.  But the villages along the front were silent.

I once asked an officer what had become of the dogs.

“The soldiers eat them!” he said soberly.

I heard the real explanation later.  The strongest dogs had been commandeered for the army, and these brave dogs of Flanders, who have always laboured, are now drawing mitrailleuses, as I saw them at L——.  The little dogs must be fed, and there is no food to spare.  And so the children, over whose heads passes unheeded the real significance of this drama that is playing about them, have their own small tragedies these days.

We got into the car again and it moved off.  With every revolution of the engine we were advancing toward that sinister line that borders No Man’s Land.  We were very close.  The road paralleled the trenches, and shelling had begun again.

It was not close, and no shells dropped in our vicinity.  But the low, horizontal red streaks of the German guns were plainly visible.

With the cessation of the rain had begun again the throwing over the Belgian trenches of the German magnesium flares, which the British call starlights.  The French call them fusees.  Under any name I do not like them.  One moment one is advancing in a comfortable obscurity.  The next instant it is the Fourth of July, with a white rocket bursting overhead.  There is no noise, however.  The thing is miraculously beautiful, silent and horrible.  I believe the light floats on a sort of tiny parachute.  For perhaps sixty seconds it hangs low in the air, throwing all the flat landscape into clear relief.