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.

I craved companionship of any living creature to break the spell of death and silence.  I was destined to have the wish gratified in abundance.  Fifteen minutes brought me to the outskirts of Vise, and there, coming over the hills and wending their way down to the river, were two long lines of German soldiers escorting wagons of the artillery and the commissariat.  They came slowly and noiselessly trudging on and I was upon them as they crossed the main road before I realized it.  The men were covered with dust; so were the horses.  The wagons were in their somber paint of gray.  There was something ominous and threatening in the long sullen line which wound down over the hill.  The soldiers were evidently tired with the tedious uneventful march, and the drivers were goaded to irritability by the difficulty of the descent.  Could I have retreated I would have done so with joy and would never have stopped until my feet were set on Holland soil.

But I dared not do it.  As the train came to a stop, I started bravely across the road.  A soldier, dropping his gun from his shoulder, cried: 

“Halt!”

“Is this the way to Vise?” I asked.

“Perhaps it is,” he replied, “but what do you want in Vise?”

As he spoke, he kept edging up, pointing his bayonet directly at me.  A bayonet will never look quite the same to me again.  Total retreat, as I remarked, was out of the question.  My inward anatomy, however, did the next best thing.  As the bayonet point came pressing forward, my stomach retired backward.  I could feel it distinctly making efforts to crawl behind my spine.  At my first word of German his face relaxed.  Ditto my stomach.

“You are an American,” he said.  “Well, good for that.  I don’t know what we would have done were you a Belgian.  Our orders are to suffer no Belgian in this whole district.”