one bridge still stood. She said nothing of a fight at that place. It
is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two towns almost
touched. Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the people so
concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that they seemed
not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or two miles away
had fared.

Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissière to find
the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also,
and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on which
we stumbled.

Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond
the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth
with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which,
after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and
might become a pestilence. When we told them we meant to enter La
Buissière they held up their soiled hands in protest.

"There has been much fighting there," one said, "and many are dead, and
more are dying. Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we
do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are
full of Germans. Hark, m'sieurs!"

Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause, a
second report. We went forward cautiously across a bridge that spanned
an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with broken
windows, from which no sign or sound of life came. Suddenly at a turn
three German privates of a lancer regiment faced us. They were burdened
with bottles of beer, and one carried his lance, which he flung