the poll of the hill.

But this war is so big a thing, as wars go, that an engagement of this
size is likely to be forgotten in a day or a week. Yet, I warrant you,
the people of La Buissière will not forget it. Nor shall we forget it
who came that way in the early afternoon of a flawless summer day. Let
me try to recreate La Buissière for you, reader. Here the Sambre, a
small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized
creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and
weSt. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond
like the rim of a saucer. The town--most of it--is on this side. On
the south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy
feet high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau,
where trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander
between fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar
beets. As for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people--
Walloons and Flemish folk--living in tall, bleak, stone houses built
flush with the little crooked streets. Invariably these houses are of a
whitish gray color; almost invariably they are narrow and cramped-
looking, with very peaky gables, somehow suggesting flat-chested old men
standing in close rows, with their hands in their pockets and their
shoulders shrugged up.

A canal bisects one corner of the place, and spanning the river there
are--or were--three bridges, one for the railroad and two for foot and
vehicular travel. There is a mill which overhangs the river--the
biggest building in the town--and an ancient gray convent, not quite so
large as the mill; and, of course, a church. In most of the houses
there are tiny shops on the lower floors, and upstairs are the homes of
the people. On the northern side of the stream every tillable foot of