house was."

A quarter of a mile behind us, as the alderman sat upon a rock
beside the gravestone, lay the thin neck of the Upper Scheldt, less
than one hundred yards wide at this point, where it curved between
the lines of charred and flattened buildings. We could still see the
rush of water tumbling and splashing through the wreckage of the
bridge we had just crossed. Twice it had been dynamited and twice
rebuilt in part, so that at present a single line of slippery beams,
suspended a few feet above the water and supported by some heavy
wire, was all that remained between ourselves and the retreating road
to Ghent. From the direction of Alost came the desultory boom of
German guns; across the stream behind us the Belgian outposts
whiled away the time with cigarettes and cards. Shaggy horses dozed
against the gun trucks, and the men of artillery, some stretched at full
length in the sun, others sitting bolt upright with arms folded, slept
soundly on the gun carriages. We could hear the stream gurgling. We
could hear the creak of a lazy windmill, and, coming somewhere from
the smoking piles, the hideous howl of starving hounds. Of other
human sounds there were none except the voice of Verhagen.

Ten days before Termonde had been a thriving town; that day it was
a heap of smouldering ashes. America had heard a good deal about
Tirlemont and Louvain, but not much of Termonde. Because this was
a war of millions, it did not count in the news--for it was only a
community of twelve thousand inhabitants, as pretty and quaint as
the province of Flanders boasts, the prosperous center of its rope
and cordage manufacture, with fifteen hundred houses, barracks, two
statues, a town-hall, five churches, an orphan asylum, and a convent.