From that time on, the numbers of mistreated, worn-out horses we encountered in transit back from the front increased steadily.

Finally we ceased to notice them at all.
I should explain that the description I have given of the prevalent idleness along the Meuse applied to the towns and to the scattered workingmen's villages that flanked all or nearly all the outlying and comparatively isolated factories.

In the fields and the truck patches the farming folks--women and old men usually, with here and there children--bestirred themselves to get the moldered and mildewed remnants of their summer-ripened crops under cover before the hard frost came.
Invariably we found this state of affairs to exist wherever we went in the districts of France and of Belgium that had been fought over and which were now occupied by the Germans.

Woodlands and cleared places, where engagements had taken place, would, within a month or six weeks thereafter, show astonishingly few traces of the violence and death that had violated the peace of the countryside.

New grass would be growing in the wheel ruts of the guns and on the sides of the trenches in which infantry had screened itself.