would say. A little later a woman told us she had heard the Germans
caught him watching from a window with a pair of opera glasses, and on
this evidence took him for a spy. But we could secure no direct
evidence either to confirm the tale or to disprove it.

We got to the center of the town, leaving the venerable nag behind to be
baited at a big gray barn by a big, shapeless, kindly woman hostler
whose wooden shoes clattered on the round cobbles of her stable yard
like drum taps.

In the Square, after many citizens had informed us there was nothing to
eat, a little Frenchwoman took pity on our emptiness, and, leading us to
a parlor behind a shop where she sold, among other things, post cards,
cheeses and underwear, she made us a huge omelet and gave us also good
butter and fresh milk and a pot of her homemade marmalade. Her two
little daughters, who looked as though they had escaped from a Frans
Hals canvas, waited on us while we wolfed the food down.

Quite casually our hostess showed us a round hole in the window behind
us, a big white scar in the wooden inner shutter and a flattened chunk
of lead. The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown,
had fired a bullet through the window of her house. It was proof of the
rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to
sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident
quietly. Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a
stray bullet or two through her back window? So we interpreted her
attitude.

It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at Merbes-le-
Chateau, but to go off at an angle to La Buissière, where she had heard