“And their equipment—­see how flimsy it is when compared with ours!  And their guns—­so inferior, so old-fashioned alongside the German guns!  I tell you this:  Forty-four years they have been wishing to fight us for what we did in 1870; and when the time comes they are not ready and we are ready.  While they have been singing their Marseillaise Hymn, we have been thinking.  While they have been talking, we have been working.”

Next he escorted us back along the small plateau that extended south from the face of the bluff.  We made our way through a constantly growing confusion of abandoned equipment and garments—­all the flotsam and jetsam of a rout.  I suppose we saw as many as fifty smashed French rifles, as many as a hundred and fifty canteens and knapsacks.

Crossing a sunken road, where trenches for riflemen to kneel in and fire from had been dug in the sides of the bank—­a road our guide said was full of dead men after the fight—­we came very soon to the site of the French camp.  Here, from the medley and mixture of an indescribable jumble of wreckage, certain objects stand out, as I write this, detached and plain in my mind; such things, for example, as a straw basket of twelve champagne bottles with two bottles full and ten empty; a box of lump sugar, broken open, with a stain of spilled red wine on some of the white cubes; a roll of new mattresses jammed into a natural receptacle at the root of an oak tree; a saber hilt of shining brass with the blade missing; a whole set of pewter knives and forks sown broadcast on the bruised and trampled grass.  But there was no German relic in the lot —­you may be sure of that.  Farther down, where the sunken road again wound across our path, we passed an old-fashioned family carriage jammed against the bank, with one shaft snapped off short.  Lying on the dusty seat-cushion was a single silver teaspoon.

Almost opposite the carriage, against the other bank, was a cavalryman’s boot; it had been cut from a wounded limb.  The leather had been split all the way down the leg from the top to the ankle, and the inside of the boot was full of clotted, dried blood.  And just as we turned back to return to the town I saw a child’s stuffed cloth doll—­rag dolls I think they call them in the States—­lying flat in the road; and a wagon wheel or a camion wheel had passed over the head, squashing it flat.

I am not striving for effect when I tell of this trifle.  When you write of such things as a battlefield you do not need to strive for effect.  The effects are all there, ready-made, waiting to be set down.  Nor do I know how a child’s doll came to be in that harried, uptorn place.  I only know it was there, and being there it seemed to me to sum up the fate of little Belgium in this great war.  If I had been seeking a visible symbol of Belgium’s case I do not believe I could have found a more fitting one anywhere.

Going down the hill to the town we met, skirting across our path, a party of natives wearing Red Cross distinguishments.  The lieutenant said these men had undoubtedly been beating the woods and grain fields for the scattered wounded or dead.  He added, without emotion, that from time to time they found one such; in fact, the volunteer searchers had brought in two Frenchmen just before we arrived—­one to be cared for at the hospital, the other to be buried.