intimation that there had been a fight. The gate stood ajar between its
chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French cavalry
officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar
and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree. Beneath the tree were a
sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire;
and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all
ready for the pot or the pan. Looking on past these things we saw much
scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards,
fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with
slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their
tops--which proved them to be French canteens--tumbled straw, odd shoes
with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all
the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.

As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
clumped trees of the chateau grounds. We were desperately weary, to
begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the
signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake
of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.

Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
shot to bits. From our side--that is to say, from the north and
likewise from the west--the Germans had shelled it. From the south,
plainly, the French had answered. The village, in between, had caught
the full force and fury of the contending fires. Probably the
inhabitants had warning; probably they fled when the German skirmishers
surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park. One imagined
them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage
patches. But they had left their belongings behind, all their small