Paths of Glory by Irvin S. Cobb — Read

I have told you already, how on the first battlefield of any consequence / that was visited by our party I picked up, from where it lay in the / track of the Allies' retreat, a child's rag doll. It was a grotesque / thing of print cloth, with sawdust insides. I found it at a place where / two roads met. Presumably some Belgian child, fleeing with her parents / before the German advance, dropped it there, and later a wagon or / perhaps a cannon came along and ran over it. The heavy wheel had mashed / the head of it flat.

In impressions which I wrote when the memory of the incident was vivid / in my mind, I said that, to me, this shabby little rag doll typified / Belgium. Since then I have seen many sights. Some were dramatic and / some were pathetic, and nearly all were stirring; but I still recall / quite clearly the little picture of the forks of the Belgian road, with / a background of trampled fields and sacked houses, and just at my feet / the doll, with its head crushed in and the sawdust spilled out in the / rut the ongoing army had made. And always now, when I think of this, I / find myself thinking of Belgium.