Among ourselves we decided that the white smoke came from the guns and the black from burning buildings or hay ricks.

Also we agreed that the fighting was going on beyond the spires and chimneys of a village on the crest of the hill immediately ahead of us.

We could make out a white church and, on past it, lines of gray stone cottages.
In these deductions we were partly right and partly wrong; we had hit on the approximate direction of the fighting, but it was not a village that lay before us.

What we saw was an outlying section of the city of Louvain, a place of fifty thousand inhabitants, destined within ten days to be turned into a waste of sacked ruins.
There were fields of tall, rank winter cabbages on each side of the road, and among the big green leaves we saw bright red dots.

We had to look a second time before we realized that these dots were not the blooms of the wild red poppies that are so abundant in Belgium, but the red-tipped caps of Belgian soldiers squatting in the cover of the plants.