railroad crossing had become a tin colander where flying lead had sieved
it. In a beet patch beside one of the houses was a mound of fresh earth
the length of a long man, with a cross of sticks at the head of it. A
Belgian soldier's cap was perched on the upright and a scrap of paper
was made fast to the cross arm; and two peasants stood there apparently
reading what was written on the paper. Later such sights as these were
to become almost the commonest incidents of our countryside
campaignings; but now we looked with all our eyes.

Except that the roadside ditches were littered with beer bottles and
scraps of paper, and the road itself rutted by cannon wheels, we saw
little enough after leaving Leefdael to suggest that an army had come
this way until we were in the outskirts of Brussels. In a tree-edged,
grass-plotted boulevard at the edge of the Bois, toward Tervueren,
cavalry had halted. The turf was scarred with hoofprints and strewed
with hay; and there was a row of small trenches in which the Germans had
built their fires to do their cooking. The sod, which had been removed
to make these trenches, was piled in neat little terraces, ready to be
put back; and care plainly had been taken by the troopers to avoid
damaging the bark on the trunks of the ash and elm trees.

There it was--the German system of warfare! These Germans might carry on
their war after the most scientifically deadly plan the world has ever
known; they might deal out their peculiarly fatal brand of drumhead
justice to all civilians who crossed their paths bearing arms; they
might burn and waste for punishment; they might lay on a captured city
and a whipped province a tribute of foodstuffs and an indemnity of money
heavier than any civilized race has ever demanded of the cowed and
conquered--might do all these things and more besides--but their common
troopers saved the sods of the greensward for replanting and spared the