For answer they shrugged their shoulders.
The Germans were right. It was not dangerous--that is, for the Germans. By repeatedly proclaiming the everlasting friendship of Germany and America, and passing out some chocolate, I made good friends on the home base. They charged me only not to return after sundown, giving point to their advice by relating how, on the previous night, they had shot down a peasant woman and her two children who, under the cloak of darkness, sought to scurry past the sentinels. They told this with a genuine note of grief in their voices. So, with a hearty hand-shake and wishes for the best of luck, they waved adieu to me as I went swinging out on the highroad to Liege.
A half mile and I came for the first time actually face to face with the wastage of war. There was what once was Mouland, the little village I had seen burning the night before. The houses stood roofless and open to the sky, like so many tombstones over a departed people. The whitewashed outer walls were all shining in the morning sun. Inside they were charred black, or blazing yet with coals from the fire still slowly burning its way through wood and plaster. Here and there a house had escaped the torch.
By some miracle in the smashed window of one of these houses a bright red geranium blossomed. It seemed to cry for water, but I dared not turn aside, for fear of a bullet from a lurking sentry. In another a sewing-machine of American make testified to the thrift and progressiveness of one household. In the last house as I left the village a rocking-horse with its head stuck through the open door smiled its wooden smile, as if at any rate it could keep good cheer even though the roofs might fall.
My road now wound into the open country; and I was heartily glad of it, for the hedges and the houses at Mouland provided fine coverts for prowling German foragers or for Belgians looking for revenge. Dead cows and horses and dogs with their sides ripped open by bullets lay along the wayside. The roads were deep printed with the hoofs of the cavalry. The grain-fields were flattened out. Nine little crosses marked the place where nine soldiers of the Kaiser fell.
This smiling countryside, teeming with one of the densest populations in the world, had been stripped clean of every inhabitant. Along the wasted way not the sign of a civilian, or for that matter even a soldier, was to be seen. I was glad even of the presence of a pig which, with her litter, was enjoying the unwonted pleasure of rooting out her morning meal in a rich flower-garden. She did not reciprocate, however, with any such fellow feeling. Perhaps of late she had seen enough of the doings of the genus homo. Surveying me as though I had been the author of all this destruction, she gave a frightened snort and plunged into a nearby thicket.