Nieuport has been badly damaged by the German bombardment, and it is said that half the houses in it appear to have been struck by shells, yet that it has not been so utterly ruined as some of the surrounding villages.  The worst loss as regards buildings at Nieuport has been the destruction of the church, which, as many photographs show well, has been almost completely demolished.  It was a fine specimen of one of the few stone churches found in that part of the country, with twelfth-century Gothic windows.  The walls and pillars stand bare, the roof has gone, and half the tower, whose bells lie buried on the ground amid the wreckage.  Desultory fighting continued at Nieuport after the main German attack shifted south to Ypres.—­[Photo. by C.N.]

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The illustrated war news, Nov. 18, 1914—­47

[Illustration:  What it means to villagers to have Germans billeted upon them:  Motor-corps officers asleep in A Cottage.]

The inhabitants of those parts of France and Belgium which are still groaning under the German incubus are greatly to be pitied.  Beyond the terrible agony inflicted by the invaders upon defenceless populations, in the form of executions and house-burnings and various forms of outrage, there is a great mass of less drastic but still intolerable misery to be borne by those unfortunate householders who are compelled to house and feed the soldiers of the enemy.  Some idea of the nature of the infliction to which they are subjected can be gathered from such a drawing as that here reproduced.  It shows some officers of the motor-corps of the Nineteenth German Army Corps asleep in a house upon which they have been billeted.  The drawing is by a German artist.

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48—­The illustrated war news, Nov. 18, 1914.

[Illustration:  At Ypres, with the British:  The French naval brigade charging.]

Much hard fighting on the Yser and elsewhere in West Flanders has fallen to the lot of the French bluejackets of the Naval Brigade, a strong force of whom were brought up from Brest to reinforce the Belgians in their defensive battles near the coast after the retreat from Antwerp.  Attacking side by side with the British, they retook Ypres on October 13, and after that held Dixmude for weeks.

[Illustration:  News from the front:  The Kaiser’s Bad quarter of an hour.]

“The Kaiser,” according to an American who was recently permitted to visit the Imperial headquarters in a “small city” on the Meuse, is a good deal altered in his appearance.  “He wears a dirty green-grey uniform, and has an intense earnestness of expression that seemed to mirror the sternness of the times.”  He “lives in a little red-brick house such as one would rent in a London suburb for L50.”