Later we are to see several thousand French prisoners; but now the sight is at once a sensation and a novelty to us.

These are all French prisoners; there are no Belgians or Englishmen among them.

In their long, cumbersome blue coats and baggy red pants they are huddled down against a wall in a heap of straw.

They lie there silently, chewing straws and looking very forlorn.

Four German soldiers with fixed bayonets are guarding them.
The young lieutenant leads us along a steeply ascending road over a ridge and then stops; and as we look about us the consciousness strikes home to us, with almost the jar of a physical blow, that we are standing where men have lately striven together and have fallen and died.
In front of us and below us is the town, with the river winding into it at the east and out of it at the west; and beyond the town, to the north, is the cup-shaped valley of fair, fat farm lands, all heavy and pregnant with un-garnered, ungathered crops.