which lies beneath the veneer.

All the photographers were fired with desire to make a similar
picture in Belgium, yet though we raced here and there, and
everywhere that rumor led us, we found it but a futile chase.

Through the Great Hall in Ghent there poured 100,000 refugees.
Here we pleaded how absolutely imperative it was that we should
obtain an atrocity picture. The daughter of the burgomaster, who
was in charge, understood our plight and promised to do her best.
But out of the vast concourse she was able to uncover but one
case that could possibly do service as an atrocity.

It was that of a blind peasant woman with her six children. The
photographers told her to smile, but she didn't, nor did the older
children; they had suffered too horribly to make smiling easy.
When the Germans entered the village the mother was in bed with
her day-old baby. Her husband was seized and, with the other
men, marched away, as the practice was at that period of the
invasion, for some unaccountable reason. With the roof blazing
over her head, she was compelled to arise from her bed and drag
herself for miles before she found a refuge. I related this to a
German later and he said: "Oh, well, there are plenty of peasant
women in the Fatherland who are hard at work in the fields three
days after the birth of their child."

The Hall filled with women wailing for children, furnished
heartrending sights, but no victim bore such physical marks as the
most vivid imagination could construe into an atrocity.