And, one and all, they
were as tongueless as so many ghosts. Thus we traveled; and at the end
of the first hour came to the tiny town of Leefdael.
At Leefdael there must have been fighting, for some of the houses were
gutted by shells. At least two had been burned; and a big tin sign at a
railroad crossing had become a tin colander where flying lead had sieved
it. In a beet patch beside one of the houses was a mound of fresh earth
the length of a long man, with a cross of sticks at the head of it. A
Belgian soldier's cap was perched on the upright and a scrap of paper
was made fast to the cross arm; and two peasants stood there apparently
reading what was written on the paper. Later such sights as these were
to become almost the commonest incidents of our countryside
campaignings; but now we looked with all our eyes.
Except that the roadside ditches were littered with beer bottles and
scraps of paper, and the road itself rutted by cannon wheels, we saw
little enough after leaving Leefdael to suggest that an army had come
this way until we were in the outskirts of Brussels.
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