From Villa Beau-sejour, Vivien Warren passed on to the Oudekens’ farm, wondering what she would see—­Some fresh horror?  But on the contrary, Mme. Oudekens looked years younger; indeed when Vivien first stood outside the house door, she had heard really hearty laughter coming from the orchard where the farmer’s widow was pinning up clothes to dry.  Yet it was here that the woman’s husband had been shot and buried, as the result of a field-court’s sentence.

But when she answered Vivien’s questions, after plying her with innumerable enquiries, she admitted with a blush that Heinrich, the German sergeant, with whom she had first cohabited by constraint, had recently married her at the Mairie, though the Cure had refused to perform the religious service.  Heinrich was now invariably kind and worked hard on the farm.  He hoped by diligently supplying the officers’ messes in Brussels with poultry and vegetables that he and his assistants—­two corporals—­might be overlooked and not sent back into the fighting ranks.  As to her daughters, after a few months of promiscuity—­a terrible time that Mme. Oudekens wanted to forget—­they had been assigned to the two corporals as their exclusive property.  They were both of them about to become mothers, and if no one interfered, as soon as this accursed War was over their men would marry them.  “But,” said Vivie, “suppose your husband and these corporals are married already, in Germany?” “Qu’est-ce-que ca fait?” said Mme. Oudekens.  “C’est si loin.”  By making these little concessions she had already saved her youngest son from deportation to Germany.

The enormous demands for food in Brussels, which in 1918 had a floating population of over a million and where the Germans were turning large dogs into pemmican, had tripled the value of all productive farms so near the capital as those round Tervueren, especially now the railway service was reopened.  Many of the peasants were making huge fortunes in complicity with some German soldier-partner.

In Brussels itself, soldiers often sided with the people against the odious “polizei,” the intolerable German spies and police agents.  Conflicts would sometimes occur in the trams and the streets when the German police endeavoured to arrest citizens for reading the Times or La Libre Belgique, or for saying disrespectful things about the Emperor.

The tremendous rush of the German offensive onward to the Marne, Somme, and Ypres salient in March-June, 1918, was received by the shifting garrison of Brussels with little enthusiasm.  Would it not tend to prolong the War?  The German advance into France was spectacular, but it was paid for by an appalling death-roll.  The hospitals at Brussels were filled to overflowing with wounded and dying men.  The Austrians who were brought from the Italian front to replenish the depleted battalions, quarrelled openly with the Prussians, and in some cases had to be surrounded in a barrack square and shot down.