bewildered children; their clean floors were tracked by the muddy
boots of soldiers; their orderly lives disturbed, uprooted; their once
tidy farmyards were filled with transports; their barns with army
horses; their windmills, instead of housing sacks of grain, were
occupied by _mitrailleuses_.

What were the thoughts of these people? What are they thinking
now?--for they are still there. What does it all mean to them? Do they
ever glance at the moving cord of the war map on the wall? Is this war
to them only a matter of a courtyard or a windmill? Of mud and the
upheaval of quiet lives? They appear to be waiting--for spring,
probably, and the end of hostilities; for spring and the planting of
crops, for quiet nights to sleep and days to labour.

The young men are always at the front. They who are left express
confidence that these their sons and husbands will return. And yet in
the spring many of them ploughed shallow over battlefields.

It had been planned to show me first a detail map of the places I was
to visit, and with this map before me to explain the present position
of the Belgian line along the embankment of the railroad from Nieuport
to Dixmude. The map was ready on a table in the officers' mess, a bare
room with three long tables of planks, to which a flight of half a
dozen steps led from the headquarters room below.

Twilight had fallen by that time. It had commenced to rain. I could
see through the window heavy drops that stirred the green surface of
the moat at one side of the old building. On the wall hung the
advertisement of an American harvester, a reminder of more peaceful
days. The beating of the rain kept time to the story Captain F----