“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.