It must be heart-breaking to see the plot of ground you love laid waste and trampled down, without being able to do anything to save it. It must be still more heart-breaking to see the home that you have cherished devoured by flames, and then, on dark and stormy nights, taking your children by the hand or on your back, and followed by terror-stricken women and bewildered old people, to flee from that home and wander along toilsome roads to uncertainty, in company with hundreds of others who know just as little where to go for help or safety. We met many such crowds of homeless wayfarers on our march, people who could hardly drag themselves along for hunger and cold and terror. There were miserable carts drawn by miserable, starved horses and wretched bits of furniture, piled up anyhow in haste and fear. There were people huddled together under the lee of a hedge or in a wood, or sheltering in the holes they had dug into banks of earth or dykes, wrapped in rags, starving with cold and still terror-stricken. Men gazing towards the homes from which they had fled, looking in bewilderment and despair at the down-trodden and ruined country; women lying down and trying to warm their little ones at a naked, impoverished breast, or groaning in misery and hopelessness over the dying eyes of a child; old men and old women with only one wish in the world--the sum and substance of their prayers from hour to hour being that God would take them away from all this misery, which they could not in the least comprehend and which they had not strength enough to bear. II--"WHAT APPALLING THINGS THEY TOLD US" And what appalling things they told us, in trembling voices and shaking with sobs! Not only their homes, their domestic animals and their furniture had been harried by fire and sword--it cannot be otherwise in war, I suppose, for it has no mercy. It had been here as it had been in Belgium--the soldiers were intoxicated with savagery and the lust of destruction. In such an army there may be a thousand scoundrels amongst a hundred thousand decent men; but scoundrels create new scoundrels, drink begets coarseness, and coarseness begets violence. Old men are mocked and tortured, women outraged without mercy, and innocent little children are made to suffer without pity. Men have to pay for their hate and their defiance, even though honest and justifiable, with military retribution, merely because one of them has been impudent. He has stirred up and set ablaze passionate instincts that no one can quench.