sugar beets.

We stopped and watched. The wagon bumped through the beet patch to
where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug. The diggers
were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw
upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a
painting by Millet. Their spades were speared upright into the mound of
fresh earth. Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky
line.

We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon. We saw them slide into the
shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in
the hole.

Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to
the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us. There was one detached
house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the
field where the burial took place. It had a shield on its front wall
bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs
house.

A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French boundary
came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road. Had the gravediggers
picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two
dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.

The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise
through the elm-tree aisles along our route. Just as it disappeared we
met a string of refugees--men, women and children--all afoot, all
bearing pitiably small bundles. They limped along silently in a