On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor-lorries, motor-cars and transport-wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches, or upturned in the wayside fields, with broken breach-blocks or without their sights. It was good to see them there. Field-guns captured thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-boys made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like the “One Hoss Shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor-lorries, motor-cars, and transport-wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts. One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in towns like Liège and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German howitzer--a colossus--sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the monster.