As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window, and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it, with two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine, and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of rage and grief. “O my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses--we were innkeepers--and last night they sent us to this part of the town and burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she said, “they made a devil’s _charivari_ and set many houses on fire.” Her husband spoke to me over his wife’s shoulder. “Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down for four years. They are bandits and robbers.” “We are hungry,” said the thin little girl. By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint. “We have eaten our bread, and I am hungry.” They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with them, but I could not wait. The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands. “You will come back?” she asked. “I will try,” I said. Then she wept again, and said: “We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us.” That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people. I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire with Yellow Cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men, and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through; but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy gas of the Yellow Cross shells filtered down to where the women and their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,” he told me. “I am not weak in the stomach--but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit.” He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.