The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown,
had fired a bullet through the window of her house. It was proof of the
rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to
sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident
quietly. Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a
stray bullet or two through her back window? So we interpreted her
attitude.
It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at Merbes-le-
Chateau, but to go off at an angle to La Buissiere, where she had heard
one bridge still stood. She said nothing of a fight at that place. It
is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two towns almost
touched. Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the people so
concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that they seemed
not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or two miles away
had fared.
Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissiere to find
the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also,
and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on which
we stumbled.
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