Belgian peasant housewife has cleaned the inside of her house she issues
forth with bucket and scrubbing brush and washes the outside of it--and
even the pavement in front and the cobbles of the road. But the war had
come to La Buissière and turned it upside down.

A war wastes towns, it seems, even more visibly than it wastes nations.
Already the streets were ankle-deep in filth. There were broken lamps
and broken bottles and broken windowpanes everywhere, and one could not
step without an accompaniment of crunching glass from underfoot.

Sacks of provender, which the French had abandoned, were split open and
their contents wasted in the mire while the inhabitants went hungry.
The lower floors of the houses were bedded in straw where the soldiers
had slept, and the straw was thickly covered with dried mud and already
gave off a sour-sickish odor. Over everything was the lime dust from
the powdered walls and plastering.

We drove away, then, over the hill toward the south. From the crest of
the bluff we could look down on ruined La Buissière, with its garrison
of victorious invaders, its frightened townspeople, and its houses full
of maimed and crippled soldiers of both sides.

Beyond we could see the fields, where the crops, already overripe, must
surely waste for lack of men and teams to harvest them; and on the edge
of one field we marked where the three peasants dug the grave for the
rotting horse, striving to get it underground before it set up a plague.

Except for them, busy with pick and spade, no living creature in sight
was at work.