The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked with the Belgian colours in concentric circles—black, white, red) turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,” the Commissaire announced in pantomime.

Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know they were French guns—although the accent was marked!—until the Commissaire told me; but then he knew every battery, every cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its claret-red roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.

We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and stared about us.

“The Germans shell Zandt almost every day,” said the Commissaire coolly. “That French battery we just passed will probably wake them up. Put the car in the lee of that wall, Pierre,” he called to the chauffeur. “We shall be back in ten minutes.”

“This, gentlemen,” he said, as we walked down the principal street of Zandt, “is called the Street of the Spy, because, up to this moment, no German shells have fallen in it. The population of Zandt pretend that it is because the Germans have a spy living in this street. Droll, isn’t it?”

We laughed with him. It is true that no shells had fallen in the Street of the Spy, but they had missed it by inches, not yards or rods. If I have ever said that the Germans do not use heavy calibre shells on unfortified villages and towns, I apologize. They use their very heaviest shells on these little defenceless villages of west Flanders just behind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily shells which are as destructive as cyclones into three or four room dwelling-houses. A row of such houses falls like a sand castle when such a shell arrives.

“But the people want to stay here, of course,” explained the Commissaire. “Where can they go? The peasant and the man of the small town has no capital except his farm or his house or his winkel—his little shop. He has no bank account. He is primitive. He is simple. All he has in the world is here in Zandt. And so he stays. Yes, we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is hardest on the children and the little babies.

“Those boys we are sending away to-morrow to a safe place in France.” He pointed to two youngsters, nine and seven years old, peering through the broken glass of a near-by window.

“Are you glad to go, manneken?” he asked the elder.

“Oh, yes, yes, mynheer.”

“But why?”

“Because one has fear of the bombardment, mynheer,” said the boy, shivering.

“This you must see,” said the Commissaire, ducking his head and leading us into a small passageway between two brick walls. “It is the most interesting person in Zandt. She is eighty-three years old. She lost her only grandson in the war. She has nothing to eat except from her little garden. There, see!”

We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot of land, perhaps twenty-two feet square. A gray one-story cottage, covered with mossy thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and an outhouse inclosed it on the others. The little plot was cultivated, densely, compactly, expertly—a mosaic of fruits and green vegetables. Two apricot trees trimmed in the French fashion were trained along the wall, and a low vine, with some sort of pendent fruit, hung from the outhouse.

But strangest of all there were three beds of ornamental flowers. I stared hard at them, and suddenly I saw that they were graves!

“Good-day, madame,” the Commissaire called, touching his hat. “See, these are American gentlemen come to look at your little garden.”

She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp of lace in her white hair, wearing the ceremonial black frock which a peasant woman puts on for such feast days as the Feast of the Assumption, a white apron, and leather shoes. “You are welcome, gentlemen, you are welcome,” she said, with the grace of a chatelaine.

“But aren’t those graves?” I asked, pointing to the beds of nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds which covered three long mounds at the end of the garden, taking up almost half of the room available for vegetables and fruits. “Madame, aren’t those graves?”

“Oh, yes, mynheer,” she said.

“They have not been here long, madame?” I was looking at the transplanted geraniums, well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly at home, and the raw, muddy rim about the edges of the three mounds.

“Since April, mynheer. I tend them myself,” she added proudly.

I turned to the Commissaire. “None of those is her grandson’s grave?” I asked in a low voice.

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “Her grandson died in Germany. He was taken prisoner at LiÉge in August, 1914. Madame,” he said to her, “the gentleman asks if he may look at your graves.”

“Oh, yes, mynheeren.” She fluttered down before us, bent rheumatically at the first mound, and pulled at a weed which the rain had freshened.

“‘Pray for the soul of Franz Mueller,’” I read in breathless amazement. “A Boche?”

“A Boche, of course!” said the Commissaire.

“And the other two—they are Boches also? ‘Pray for the soul of Max Edelsheim’ and ‘Pray for the soul of Erich Schneider,’” I read aloud. The neat wooden crosses bore also the regimental numbers of the men and the date of their death.

“Boches, too. It happens that they were killed in this garden on a reconnaissance.”

“But why don’t you remove them? You can put them somewhere else, and then this poor old woman can use all her garden. I should think she could hardly raise enough to eat from all this little plot, let alone from half of it.”

We had spoken in French, and of course the old proprietress had not understood. The Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. “Madame, the mynheer says that we should take up these bodies and place them in the churchyard. Do you wish it done so?”

At first she did not seem to understand, and bent inquiringly toward the Commissaire, her little gray eyes screwed up in bewilderment at his words. “What is it, mynheer?” she asked.

“Mynheer says that we should remove the three Germans and let you have your garden.”

“Oh, nay, nay,” she remonstrated, shaking her head emphatically. “Nay, mynheeren. God gave me these three graves instead of the grave of my boy. I could not tend them so well if they were in the churchyard. It is too far from my house. Nay, nay, let the three sleep here.”

“But you have not the room, madame.”

“There is room in my heart and in my garden, mynheer. I shall keep these three graves, and maybe in Germany there is some one who will keep the grave of my boy.”

“Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a Belgian peasant,” said the Commissaire of Metseys, as we walked back through the Street of the Spy to our waiting automobile. “But she has a fine spirit, that old grandmother.”