priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings
of saber and belt and shoulder straps.

I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the
shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking
vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time
I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.

But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it
out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other
unimportant villages in this upper left-hand corner of the map of
Europe. The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a
side-slap.

We came to it just before dusk. All day we had been hurrying along,
trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved
faster than we did, even though they fought as they went. They had gone
round the southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it
in with tight bands of steel. Belgium--or this part of it--was all
barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already
across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.

Besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear.
There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Chateau, where the English had
been; and the hour we spent at La Buissière, on the river Sambre, where
a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Chateau is
another story and so is La Buissière. Just after La Buissière we came
to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local Jack-of-all-
trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.