Cats sat on the doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard imprisoned beasts lowing dismally.

Cows were there, with agonized udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no dogs.

We already had remarked this fact--that in every desolated village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish- looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters.

And it was so in Montignies St.Christophe.
On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at us through a break in the wall.

He called out to her in French, but she never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter.