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.
Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which, after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and might become a pestilence.

When we told them we meant to enter La Buissiere they held up their soiled hands in protest.
"There has been much fighting there," one said, "and many are dead, and more are dying.

Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are full of Germans.

Hark, m'sieurs!" Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause, a second report.

We went forward cautiously across a bridge that spanned an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with broken windows, from which no sign or sound of life came.