Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe I have told you already, how on the first battlefield of any consequence that was visited by our party I picked up, from where it lay in the track of the Allies' retreat, a child's rag doll.

It was a grotesque thing of print cloth, with sawdust insides.

I found it at a place where two roads met.

Presumably some Belgian child, fleeing with her parents before the German advance, dropped it there, and later a wagon or perhaps a cannon came along and ran over it.

The heavy wheel had mashed the head of it flat.
In impressions which I wrote when the memory of the incident was vivid in my mind, I said that, to me, this shabby little rag doll typified Belgium.