Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; over the level country to the south floated a German observation balloon, and presently we rumbled over a canal and through the shattered village of La Bassée. La Bassée had been in the war despatches for months, and looked it. Its church, used as a range-finder, apparently, was a gray honeycomb from which each day a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off, streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is in such houses and their cellars that soldiers fighting in the trenches in a neighborhood like this come back for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the armies one does not see at the front. The custom of billeting soldiers in houses--possible in territory so closely built up--adds to the vagueness of modern warfare. Americans associate armies with tents. When we mobilized ten thousand men at San Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers. Ten thousand men in this war disappear like water in sand. Some of them are in the trenches, some in villages like this, out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few minutes' walk of their work, so to speak. Others are distributed farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, crisscrossed with telephone-wires, and so arranged with assembling stations, reserves, and sub-reserves that the whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to the front. There is continual movement in this body--the men in the trenches go back after forty-eight hours to the near-by village, after days or weeks of this service, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh men come up to take their places, and so on. All you see as you whirl through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there at a second-story window, a company shuffling along a country road. Women watched us from the doors of La Bassée--still going on living here, somehow, as human beings will on the volcano's very edge--and children were playing in the street. Husbands gone, food gone, the country swept bare--why did they not go, too? But where? Here, at any rate, there was a roof overhead--until a shell smashed it--and food soldiers were glad to share. There must be strange stories to tell of these little islands on the edge of the battle, where the soldiers who are going out to be killed, and the women whose husbands, perhaps, are going to help kill them, huddle together for a time, victims of a common storm. We whirled past them down the road a bit, then walked up a gentle slope to the right. Over this low ridge, from the English trenches, rifle-bullets whistled above our heads. In the shelter of a brick farmhouse a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench service, to go back to La Bassée. They were smallish, mild-looking men, dusted with the yellow clay in which they had burrowed--clothes, boots, faces, and hands---until they looked like millers.