It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops, and white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were standing by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping feet. The men wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the usual conditions of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol rode forward with drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine forests along the edge of deep ravines in which innumerable “Christmas-trees” were powdered with glistening frost. There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen roads, but the countryside was intensely silent. The farmhouses we passed and cottages under the shelter of the woods seemed abandoned. No flags hung out from them like those millions of flags which had fluttered along all the miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again, looking back at a farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but it was quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely. “First sign of hostility!” said the cavalry lieutenant, turning round in his saddle and laughing boyishly. The troopers behind him grinned under their steel hats, and then looked stern again, glancing sideways into the glades of those silent fir-woods. “It would be easy to snipe us from those woods,” said Harding. “Too damned easy!” “And quite senseless,” said Brand. “What good would it do them?” Harding was prepared to answer the question. He had been thinking it out. “The Hun never did have any sense. He’s not likely to get it now. Nothing will ever change him. He is a bad, treacherous, evil swine. We must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes----” “What?” asked Brand. Harding had a grim look, and his mouth was hard. “We must act without mercy, as they did in Louvain.” “Wholesale murder, you mean?” said Brand, harshly. “A free hand for machine-guns,” said Harding, “if they ask for it.” Brand gave his usual groan. “Oh, Lord!... Haven’t we finished with blood?” We dipped down towards Malmédy. There was a hairpin turn in the road, and we could see the town below us in the valley--a German town. “Pretty good map-reading!” shouted the cavalry kid. He was pleased with himself for having led his troop on the right road, but I guessed that he would be glad to halt this side of the mystery that lay in that town where Sunday bells were ringing. A queer thing happened then. Up a steep bank was a party of girls. German girls, of course, and the first civilians we had seen. A flutter of white handkerchiefs came from them. They were waving to us. “Well, I’m damned!” said Harding. “Not yet,” answered Brand, ironically, but he was as much astonished as all of us.