Newly tarred barges loll slowly along the Bruges-Ghent canal, and there is a vista along the straight water to the belfry of Ghent and the cathedral. The sides of the canal are lush with verdure; health and happiness spread out from its banks. One would say also the war never was here. But in Somerghem the old church on the hill crowning the town has been blown up. Its tower gave a view for leagues around, and the Devil made good use of it when he had a chance and when he had done his task blew it up lest others should follow his example. The Germans evacuated the town just before the end of the war; the Belgian army bombarded it and placed a gas concentration there. It was retaken, but at the price of a most beautiful church. The inhabitants are all back. They remember the Tommies and, of course, the Scots. The Gordons in their kilts made a lasting impression. Somerghem saw much war life before the enemy marched away, and German soldier life, with its violently repressive military discipline and its correspondingly lax morality, was rife. The more perfect their military obedience the less heed there was of God. One sees in these parts not a few war-babies, and worse than these, for they are innocent enough, one sees war-children in adolescence. The numbers of depraved young girls is appalling. Perhaps there were many before the war, but they look rather like war products. How many of them there are in the beer-houses and backyards of the small towns! It is difficult to avoid adventures with them. Bertha and Martha, depraved little rascals, come running along the canal bank, one in clogs, one in stocking soles. They talk scraps of German and scraps of French, and make disgusting gestures and throw themselves about in hard, coarse laughter. Martha is a strong and brazen little hussy with red face and fat little arms. Bertha is a soft-witted, pallid slip of a girl with full throat and weak lips. Both have long black finger-nails, both are in cotton rags; but Bertha has a large yellow festering wound on her ankle which she says was caused by a bit of shrapnel. Bertha is the younger. Martha may be sixteen; Bertha would be two years younger. And Martha would get Bertha into trouble. "Take Bertha!" she says continually, suggestively making signs. Poor war-children! When the war began Martha was ten and Bertha was eight. Martha was corrupted in it; pale, sickly, weak-lipped Bertha, with the shrapnel wound, perhaps not actually corrupted. When the wound had been examined and their nails cut they concluded they had met a doctor.