The vineyards and fields and gardens around were destroyed and running to waste in the most pitiful way, for every one connected with them, who had formerly cherished and tended them with such care and attention, had either been killed or else sought safety in flight to the cities, where their refuge was equally precarious.

Along the highway, the trees, whose branches once gave such grateful shade to wayfarers, were now cut down, only rows of hideous, half-consumed stumps remaining in their stead; while here and there, as the scene of some great battle was passed, great mounds like oblong bases of flattened pyramids rose above the surface of the devastated plain--mounds under whose frozen surface lay the mouldering bodies of thousands of brave men who had fallen on the bloody field, their last resting-place unmarked by sepulchral cross or monumental marble.

Everywhere there was terrible evidence of the effects of war and the price of that "glory" which, the poet sings truly, "leads but to the grave!" Fritz was sickened with it all; but, what struck his keen sense of honour and honesty more, was the wholesale pillage and robbery permitted by the German commanders to be exercised by their soldiery on the defenceless peasantry of France.

A cart which he overhauled, proceeding back to the frontier, contained such wretched spoil as women's clothes, a bale of coffee, a quantity of cheap engravings and chimney ornaments, an old-fashioned kitchen clock, with an arm-chair--the pride of some fireside corner--a quantity of copper, and several pairs of ear-rings, such as are sold for a few sous in the Palais Royale! The sight of this made his blood boil, and Fritz got into some trouble with a colonel of Uhlans by ordering the contents of the cart to be at once confiscated and burnt, the huckster being on the good books of that officer--doubtless as a useful collector of curios! It was a current report amongst the French at the time that the German army was followed by a tribe of Jew speculators, who purchased from the soldiers the plunder that they certainly could not themselves expect to carry back to their own country; and this incident led Fritz to believe the rumour well founded.
"Heavens, little mother," as he wrote home subsequently to Madame Dort, after his experience of what went on at headquarters under his new commander.

"I do not fear the enemy; but the only thing which will do us any harm, God willing that we come safely home, is that we shall not be able to distinguish between mine and thine, the `meum' and `tuum' taught us at school, for we shall be all thorough thieves; that is to say, we are ordered to take--`requisition' they call it--everything that we can find and that we can use.