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Before this my eyes had been so busy recording impressions that my nose
had neglected its duty; now for the first time I sensed the vile reek
that arose from all about me. The place was one big, horrid stink. It
smelled of ether and iodoform and carbolic acid--there being any number
of improvised hospitals, full of wounded, in sight; it smelled of sour
beef bones and stale bread and moldy hay and fresh horse dung; it
smelled of the sweaty bodies of the soldiers; it smelled of everything
that is fetid and rancid and unsavory and unwholesome.
And yet, forty-eight hours before, this town, if it was like every other
Belgian town, must have been as clean as clean could be. When the
Belgian peasant housewife has cleaned the inside of her house she issues
forth with bucket and scrubbing brush and washes the outside of it--and
even the pavement in front and the cobbles of the road. But the war had
come to La Buissiere and turned it upside down.
A war wastes towns, it seems, even more visibly than it wastes nations.


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