But then, afterwards, there must be no sentimentalising over the glitter of a splendour we have not seen; no wilful blindness when, the cloud cleared away, the light of sanity falls again upon the nakedness of its inhuman mechanism, the hideous squalor and vulgarity of its monstrous destructiveness. A few days ago I was waiting with a crowd outside a Bureau in Paris. Anxious, resigned faces passed me going in or out. No tragedy, no moving emotion. The families of the soldiers in the front were making their weekly inquiry for the little numbered disc each soldier wears for identification. The best they could hope for was to receive nothing, to have to come and ask again, and again, till the end of the war. The only break would come when the little disc at last might be handed them, and they would know that son or husband, somewhere, somehow, had vanished in the shadow of war for all time. In Wavre, where I used to pass continually on the way to the Belgian lines, was a small welcome restaurant, kept by a cheerful pretty girl, her young husband, and a baby. There was laugh and joke as to "what would happen if the Prussians came!" On the morning of the day of evacuation I passed again. Still only quiet anxiety and less ready smiles. Three hours later I returned. The Uhlans were entering the edges of the town. A peasant rushed into the swarming square, waving a Uhlan helmet. There was a savage rush; and a woman shrieked: "It's the head of the devil who wore it I want!" It was the young wife. A fury, raging at her husband; for the men had been told to disarm. "Take it," she screamed furiously, thrusting his rifle at him, "never see me again, if our house is entered without one brute shot." Blanched, shaking with passion, and speechless, the young man walked out. I saw her again on the road to Brussels, aged, scarcely sane. The man had not come back. She had lost her child. In west Flanders, on the day that the Prussian columns were pouring across Belgium, I passed in the morning a remote, picturesque little crossing. A very old peasant, in a smock, deaf and almost blind, acting as a Civil Guard, gave me great difficulty. He had blocked the road with harrows, and threatened viciously with an old muzzle-loader and rusty bayonet of the time of Waterloo. In the evening, carrying some wounded soldiers, we passed again. He was still hugging the bayonet. We persuaded him to let us bury it, his useless death-warrant, for the Uhlans were flooding behind us. With that, realisation at last came to him. He walked deliberately back towards the cottage. "All that I had left, for my son is dead. But I will destroy this too. The Prussians shall not shelter there."