As though they took pattern by the example of Nature, the peasants would be afield, gathering what remained of their harvests--even plowing and harrowing the ground for new sowing.
On the very edge of the battle front we saw them so engaged, seemingly paying less heed to the danger of chance shell-fire than did the soldiers who passed and repassed where they toiled.
In the towns almost always the situation was different.

The people who lived in those towns seemed like so many victims of a universal torpor.
They had lost even their sense of inborn curiosity regarding the passing stranger.

Probably from force of habit, the shopkeepers stayed behind their counters; but between them and the few customers who came there was little of the vivacious chatter one has learned to associate with dealings among the dwellers in most Continental communities.

We passed through village after village and town after town, to find in each the same picture--men and women in mute clusters about the doorways and in the little squares, who barely turned their heads as the automobile flashed by.

Once in a while we caught the sound of a brisker tread on the cobbled street; but when we looked, nine times in ten we saw that the walker was a soldier of the German garrison quartered there to keep the population quiet and to help hold the line of communication.
I think, though, this cankered apathy has its merciful compensations.
After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless, impresses itself on the observer's mind as a definite and tangible fact.
The soldier gets it, and it enables him to endure his own discomforts and sufferings, and the discomforts and sufferings of his comrades, without visible mental strain.