War was not very far off after all. Two days later we were having lunch in the comfortable warm restaurant which is this tedious town's other attraction. We drank our coffee to the accompaniment of the nasty sound of arriving shells. Every time a shell screamed towards us the stout lady behind the counter dropped on hands and knees, emerging flushed and trembling after each had burst. We were rather amused; but when we went out and round the corner of the street, the body of a man was being swiftly carried away wrapped in a brown blanket. Forty soldiers, it was said, had been killed and wounded. Distracted women stood in little groups in the passages of the houses, and there was much blood in the gutters. Only a country invaded by the enemy drinks to its dregs the cup of war, but the narrow belt a few miles behind the friendly army's trenches enjoys great prosperity. The love of home or the love of money keeps the population in many places where it would be better away. One beautiful spring day I took shelter behind a farmhouse in the Hallebast-Vierstraat area until some shelling on the path ahead had died down. The farmer's wife came out and we got into conversation. A rise in the ground gave some shelter from the German lines, but she told me that any movement on horseback was immediately sniped with whizbangs. The day before all her cows had been killed by shell-fire in the paddock behind the farmhouse, but if she and her elderly husband let their land go out of cultivation, how were they to live, and if they left, where could they go? When high-explosives blew great holes in their sown land they just filled in the holes and ploughed and sowed the place over again. The settled sadness of her face and voice haunts me still. Others, however, stay in danger because they are making so much money. Several shopkeepers in this town admitted they had never known such prosperity. The estaminets make enormous profits from the sale of very weak beer. A friend of mine, having drawn battalion pay in notes of too large amounts, was told to return to the paymaster and draw it in smaller sums. He found the office closed, and turned into a little village shop to see if they could change a part of it. To his amazement they changed the whole of it from the till. The total amount was ten thousand francs. But how many Belgians have lost their all?