In these deductions we were partly right and partly wrong; we had hit on
the approximate direction of the fighting, but it was not a village that
lay before us. What we saw was an outlying section of the city of
Louvain, a place of fifty thousand inhabitants, destined within ten days
to be turned into a waste of sacked ruins.

There were fields of tall, rank winter cabbages on each side of the
road, and among the big green leaves we saw bright red dots. We had to
look a second time before we realized that these dots were not the
blooms of the wild red poppies that are so abundant in Belgium, but the
red-tipped caps of Belgian soldiers squatting in the cover of the
plants. None of them looked toward us; all of them looked toward those
mounting walls of smoke.

Now, too, we became aware of something else--aware of a procession that
advanced toward us. It was the head of a two-mile long line of
refugees, fleeing from destroyed or threatened districts on beyond. At
first, in scattered, straggling groups, and then in solid columns, they
passed us unendingly, we going one way, they going the other. Mainly
they were afoot, though now and then a farm wagon would bulk above the
weaving ranks; and it would be loaded with bedding and furniture and
packed to overflowing with old women and babies. One wagon lacked
horses to draw it, and six men pulled in front while two men pushed at
the back to propel it. Some of the fleeing multitude looked like
townspeople, but the majority plainly were peasants. And of these
latter at least half wore wooden shoes so that the sound of their feet
on the cobbled roadbed made a clattering chorus that at times almost
drowned out the hiccuping voices of the guns behind them.

Occasionally there would be a man shoving a barrow, with a baby and