the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. The
figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have
belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment. Behind the barn we found a
whole pile of new knapsacks--the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the
French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the
heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered
on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.

Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human
being. The place fairly ached with emptiness. Cats sat on the
doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard
imprisoned beasts lowing dismally. Cows were there, with agonized
udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no
dogs. We already had remarked this fact--that in every desolated
village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-
looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters. And it
was so in Montignies St. Christophe.

On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.

It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind
the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the
town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at
us through a break in the wall. He called out to her in French, but she
never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter. He
started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.