Finally we ceased to notice them at all.
I should explain that the description I have given of the prevalent
idleness along the Meuse applied to the towns and to the scattered
workingmen's villages that flanked all or nearly all the outlying and
comparatively isolated factories. In the fields and the truck patches
the farming folks--women and old men usually, with here and there
children--bestirred themselves to get the moldered and mildewed
remnants of their summer-ripened crops under cover before the hard frost
came.
Invariably we found this state of affairs to exist wherever we went in
the districts of France and of Belgium that had been fought over and
which were now occupied by the Germans. Woodlands and cleared places,
where engagements had taken place, would, within a month or six weeks
thereafter, show astonishingly few traces of the violence and death that
had violated the peace of the countryside. New grass would be growing
in the wheel ruts of the guns and on the sides of the trenches in which
infantry had screened itself.
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