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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paths of Glory, by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Paths of Glory
+       Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2004 [EBook #10798]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHS OF GLORY ***
+
+
+
+
+
+PATHS OF GLORY
+
+Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+AUTHOR OF "BACK HOME," "EUROPE REVISED,' ETC., ETC.
+
+"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+--Thomas Gray
+
+
+
+To the Memory of
+MAJOR ROBERT COBB
+(Cobb's Kentucky Battery, C. S. A.)
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+What is enclosed between these covers was written as a series of
+first-hand impressions during the fall and early winter of 1914 while the
+writer was on staff service for The Saturday Evening Post in the western
+theatre of the European War. I tried to write of war as I saw it at the
+time that I saw it, or immediately afterward, when the memory of what I
+had seen was fresh and vivid in my mind.
+
+In this volume, as here presented, no attempt has been made to follow
+either logically or chronologically the progress of events in the
+campaigning operations of which I was a witness. The chapters are
+interrelated insofar as they purport to be a sequence of pictures
+describing some of my experiences and setting forth a few of my
+observations in Belgium, in Germany, in France and in England during the
+first three months of hostilities.
+
+At the outset I had no intention of undertaking to write a book on the
+war. If in the kindly judgment of the reader what I have written
+constitutes a book I shall be gratified.
+
+I. S. C.
+
+January, 1915.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.    A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe.
+II.   To War in a Taxicab.
+III.  Sherman Said It.
+IV.  "Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter".
+V.    Being a Guest of the Kaiser.
+VI.   With the German Wrecking Crew
+VII.  The Grapes of Wrath..
+VIII. Three Generals and a Cook
+IX.   Viewing a Battle prom a Balloon
+X.    In the Trenches Before Rheims..
+XI.   War de Luxe...
+XII.  The Rut of Big Guns in France..
+XIII. Those Yellow Pine Boxes..
+XIV.  The Red Glutton..
+XV.   Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe .
+XVI.  Louvain the Forsaken.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe
+
+
+We passed through it late in the afternoon--this little Belgian town
+called Montignies St. Christophe--just twenty-four hours behind a dust-
+colored German column.  I am going to try now to tell how it looked to
+us.
+
+I am inclined to think I passed this way a year before, or a little
+less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that.  Traveling 'cross
+country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked
+when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.
+
+Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not pass, through this little
+town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through fifty
+like it--each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord,
+along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each
+with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking trough, its
+priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings
+of saber and belt and shoulder straps.
+
+I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the
+shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking
+vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time
+I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.
+
+But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it
+out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other
+unimportant villages in this upper left-hand corner of the map of
+Europe.  The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a
+side-slap.
+
+We came to it just before dusk.  All day we had been hurrying along,
+trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved
+faster than we did, even though they fought as they went.  They had gone
+round the southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it
+in with tight bands of steel.  Belgium--or this part of it--was all
+barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already
+across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.
+
+Besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear.
+There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Chateau, where the English had
+been; and the hour we spent at La Buissière, on the river Sambre, where
+a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Chateau is
+another story and so is La Buissière.  Just after La Buissière we came
+to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local Jack-of-all-
+trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.
+
+As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm
+of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a
+red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went
+up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women
+in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in
+their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the
+sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a
+long, quavering hiss.
+
+The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had
+been found in the woods beyond the river.  He was one of the last to be
+found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two
+nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and
+his wounds raw.  On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained
+hard.
+
+Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead
+of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.
+
+We had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less
+distinctly, about noontime.  Thereafter, for a while, there had been a
+lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained boom-
+boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle
+concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound.  For three
+days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying
+to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French
+frontier.  Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the
+lash of a long whip, and hurried along.  There were five of us, all
+Americans.  The two who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and
+the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart.
+We had bought the outfit that morning and we were to lose it that night.
+The horse was an aged mare, with high withers, and galls on her
+shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, after the fashion of Belgian horses; and
+the dogcart was a venerable ruin, which creaked a great protest at every
+turn of the warped wheels on the axle.  We had been able to buy the two--
+the mare and the cart--only because the German soldiers had not thought
+them worth the taking.
+
+In this order, then, we proceeded.  Pretty soon the mare grew so weary
+she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were, we
+who rode dismounted and trudged on, taking turns at dragging her forward
+by the bit.  I presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more, along an
+interminable straight road and past miles of the checkered light and
+dark green fields which in harvest time make a great backgammon board of
+this whole country of Belgium.
+
+The road was empty of natives--empty, too, of German wagon trains; and
+these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been
+hardly a minute of the day when we were not passing soldiers or meeting
+refugees.
+
+Almost without warning we came on this little village called Montignies
+St. Christophe.  A six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its name
+--a rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty
+houses, all told.  But now tragedy had given it distinction; had painted
+that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture
+of it is going to live in my memory as long as I do live.  At the upper
+end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old chateau, the
+seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park of beeches and
+elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first
+intimation that there had been a fight.  The gate stood ajar between its
+chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French cavalry
+officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar
+and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree.  Beneath the tree were a
+sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire;
+and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all
+ready for the pot or the pan.  Looking on past these things we saw much
+scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards,
+fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with
+slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their
+tops--which proved them to be French canteens--tumbled straw, odd shoes
+with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all
+the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.
+
+As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
+occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
+clumped trees of the chateau grounds.  We were desperately weary, to
+begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the
+signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake
+of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.
+
+Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
+shot to bits.  From our side--that is to say, from the north and
+likewise from the west--the Germans had shelled it.  From the south,
+plainly, the French had answered.  The village, in between, had caught
+the full force and fury of the contending fires.  Probably the
+inhabitants had warning; probably they fled when the German skirmishers
+surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park.  One imagined
+them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage
+patches.  But they had left their belongings behind, all their small
+petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and
+racking apart of their homes.
+
+A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street.
+Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the
+cross-ties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like
+rows of snaggled teeth.  Other shells, dropping in the road, had so
+wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and
+there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet
+deep.
+
+Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again.  One house
+would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to
+the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves.  Another house
+would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were
+now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter's
+door.  The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all
+gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily, like
+eye-sockets without eyes.
+
+So it went.  Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were
+quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still
+smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.
+
+Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted.  If she had had
+energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way
+she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses--a big gray and a
+roan--with their stark legs sticking out across the road.  The gray was
+shot through and through in three places.  The right fore hoof of the
+roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and
+the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it, suggesting a
+natural malformation.  Dead only a few hours, their carcasses already
+had begun to swell.  The skin on their bellies was as tight as a
+drumhead.
+
+We forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses.  Beyond them the
+road was a litter.  Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots,
+pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere.  The
+deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things.
+The dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always French caps and
+French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after the
+melee.
+
+The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French had
+fallen back--or at least so we deduced from the looks of things.  In
+the debris was no object that bespoke German workmanship or German
+ownership.  This rather puzzled us until we learned that the Germans, as
+tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast
+rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or
+small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to give the enemy an idea
+of their losses.
+
+We went by the church.  Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small
+flag--the Tricolor of France--still fluttered from a window where some
+one had stuck it.  We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a
+sign over its door--a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx.  And
+through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a
+table.  We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front
+of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn
+I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from
+the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled.  The
+figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have
+belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment.  Behind the barn we found a
+whole pile of new knapsacks--the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the
+French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the
+heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered
+on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.
+
+Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human
+being.  The place fairly ached with emptiness.  Cats sat on the
+doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard
+imprisoned beasts lowing dismally.  Cows were there, with agonized
+udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no
+dogs.  We already had remarked this fact--that in every desolated
+village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-
+looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters.  And it
+was so in Montignies St. Christophe.
+
+On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
+breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
+the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
+side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
+
+It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind
+the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the
+town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at
+us through a break in the wall.  He called out to her in French, but she
+never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter. He
+started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
+spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.
+
+Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon--a furniture dealer's
+wagon--from some larger community, which had been impressed by the
+Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service.  A jaded
+team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their
+centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft.  One man led the near
+horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon.  All three
+of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.
+
+The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends.  Overhauling it
+we saw that it contained two dead soldiers--French foot-soldiers.  The
+bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed.  Their feet somehow were
+caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red
+pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about
+to glide backward and out of the wagon.
+
+The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc,
+encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles
+these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly.  The other's head was
+canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face.  It
+was a young face--we could tell that much, even through the mask of
+caked mud on the drab-white skin--and it might once have been a comely
+face.  It was not comely now.
+
+Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly
+shot or shorn away--the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an
+abominable thing to look on. These two had been men the day before.  Now
+they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we
+saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red
+poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected
+sugar beets.
+
+We stopped and watched.  The wagon bumped through the beet patch to
+where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug.  The diggers
+were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw
+upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a
+painting by Millet.  Their spades were speared upright into the mound of
+fresh earth.  Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky
+line.
+
+We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon.  We saw them slide into the
+shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in
+the hole.
+
+Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to
+the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us.  There was one detached
+house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the
+field where the burial took place.  It had a shield on its front wall
+bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs
+house.
+
+A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French boundary
+came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road.  Had the gravediggers
+picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two
+dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.
+
+The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise
+through the elm-tree aisles along our route.  Just as it disappeared we
+met a string of refugees--men, women and children--all afoot, all
+bearing pitiably small bundles.  They limped along silently in a
+straggling procession.  None of them was weeping; none of them
+apparently had been weeping.  During the past ten days I had seen
+thousands of such refugees, and I had yet to hear one of them cry out or
+complain or protest.
+
+These who passed us now were like that.  Their heavy peasant faces
+expressed dumb bewilderment--nothing else.  They went on up the road
+into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound of
+their clunking tread died out behind us. Without knowing certainly, we
+nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of Montignies St.
+Christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.
+
+An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp and
+entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a German
+army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main force of
+the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well beyond the
+frontier.  France was invaded.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+To War in a Taxicab
+
+
+In a taxicab we went to look for this war.  There were four of us, not
+counting the chauffeur, who did not count.  It was a regular taxicab,
+with a meter on it, and a little red metal flag which might be turned up
+or turned down, depending on whether the cab was engaged or at liberty;
+and he was a regular chauffeur.
+
+We, the passengers, wore straw hats and light suits, and carried no
+baggage.  No one would ever have taken us for war correspondents out
+looking for war.  So we went; and, just when we were least expecting it,
+we found that war.  Perhaps it would be more exact to say it found us.
+We were four days getting back to Brussels, still wearing our straw
+hats, but without any taxicab.  The fate of that taxicab is going to be
+one of the unsolved mysteries of the German invasion of Belgium.
+
+From the hour when the steamer St. Paul left New York, carrying probably
+the most mixed assortment of passengers that traveled on a single ship
+since Noah sailed the Ark, we on board expected hourly to sight
+something that would make us spectators of actual hostilities.  The
+papers that morning were full of rumors of an engagement between English
+ships and German ships somewhere off the New England coast.
+
+Daily we searched the empty seas until our eyes hurt us; but, except
+that we had one ship's concert and one brisk gale, and that just before
+dusk on the fifth day out, the weather being then gray and misty, we saw
+wallowing along, hull down on the starboard bow, an English cruiser with
+two funnels, nothing happened at all.  Even when we landed at Liverpool
+nothing happened to suggest that we had reached a country actively
+engaged in war, unless you would list the presence of a few khaki-clad
+soldiers on the landing stage and the painful absence of porters to
+handle our baggage as evidences of the same.  I remember seeing Her
+Grace the Duchess of Marlborough sitting hour after hour on a baggage
+truck, waiting for her heavy luggage to come off the tardy tender and up
+the languid chute into the big dusty dockhouse.
+
+I remember, also, seeing women, with their hats flopping down in their
+faces and their hair all streaming, dragging huge trunks across the
+floor; and if all of us had not been in the same distressful fix we
+could have appreciated the humor of the spectacle of a portly high
+dignitary of the United States Medical Corps shoving a truck piled high
+with his belongings, and shortly afterward, with the help of his own
+wife, loading them on the roof of an infirm and wheezy taxicab.
+
+From Liverpool across to London we traveled through a drowsy land
+burdened with bumper crops of grain, and watched the big brown hares
+skipping among the oat stacks; and late at night we came to London.  In
+London next day there were more troops about than common, and recruits
+were drilling on the gravel walks back of Somerset House; and the people
+generally moved with a certain sober restraint, as people do who feel
+the weight of a heavy and an urgent responsibility.  Otherwise the
+London of wartime seemed the London of peacetime.
+
+So within a day our small party, still seeking to slip into the wings of
+the actual theater of events rather than to stay so far back behind the
+scenes, was aboard a Channel ferryboat bound for Ostend, and having for
+fellow travelers a few Englishmen, a tall blond princess of some royal
+house of Northern Europe, and any number of Belgians going home to
+enlist. In the Straits of Dover, an hour or so out from Folkestone, we
+ran through a fleet of British warships guarding the narrow roadstead
+between France and England; and a torpedo-boat destroyer sidled up and
+took a look at us.
+
+Just off Dunkirk a French scout ship talked with us by the language of
+the whipping signal flags; but the ordinary Channel craft came and went
+without hindrance or seeming fear, and again it was hard for us to make
+ourselves believe that we had reached a zone where the physical,
+tangible business of war went forward.
+
+And Ostend and, after Ostend, the Belgian interior--those were
+disappointments too; for at Ostend bathers disported on the long,
+shining beach and children played about the sanded stretch.  And, though
+there were soldiers in sight, one always expects soldiers in European
+countries.  No one asked to see the passports we had brought with us,
+and the customs officers gave our hand baggage the most perfunctory of
+examinations. Hardly five minutes had elapsed after our landing before
+we were steaming away on our train through a landscape which, to judge
+by its appearance, might have known only peace, and naught but peace,
+for a thousand placid years.
+
+It is true we saw during that ride few able-bodied male adults, either
+in the towns through which we rushed or in the country.  There were
+priests occasionally and old, infirm men or half-grown boys; but of men
+in their prime the land had been drained to fill up the army of defense
+then on the other side of Belgium--toward Germany--striving to hold the
+invaders in check until the French and English might come up.  The
+yellow-ripe grain stood in the fields, heavy-headed and drooping with
+seed.  The russet pears and red apples bent the limbs of the fruit trees
+almost to earth.  Every visible inch of soil was under cultivation, of
+the painfully intensive European sort; and there remained behind to
+garner the crops only the peasant women and a few crippled, aged grand-
+sires.  It was hard for us to convince ourselves that any event out of
+the ordinary beset this country. No columns of troops passed along the
+roads; no camps of tents lifted their peaked tops above the hedges.  In
+seventy-odd miles we encountered one small detachment of soldiers--they
+were at a railroad station--and one Red Cross flag.
+
+As for Brussels--why, Brussels at first glance was more like a city
+making a fete than the capital of a nation making war.  The flags which
+were displayed everywhere; the crowds in the square before the railroad
+station; the multitudes of boy scouts running about; the uniforms of
+Belgian volunteers and regulars; the Garde Civique, in their queer-
+looking costumes, with funny little derby hats, all braid-trimmed--gave
+to the place a holiday air.  After nightfall, when the people of
+Brussels flocked to the sidewalk cafes and sat at little round tables
+under awnings, drinking light drinks a la Parisienne, this impression
+was heightened.
+
+We dined in the open air ourselves, finding the prices for food and
+drink to be both moderate and modest, and able to see nothing on the
+surface which suggested that the life of these people had been seriously
+disturbed.  Two significant facts, however, did obtrude themselves on
+us: Every minute or two, as we dined, a young girl or an old gentleman
+would come to us, rattling a tin receptacle with a slot in the top
+through which coins for the aid of the widows and orphans of dead
+soldiers might be dropped; and when a little later we rode past the
+royal palace we saw that it had been converted into a big hospital for
+the wounded.  That night, also, the government ran away to Antwerp; but
+of this we knew nothing until the following morning.
+
+Next day we heard tales: Uhlans had been seen almost in the suburbs;
+three German spies, disguised as nuns, had been captured, tried,
+convicted and were no longer with us; sentries on duty outside the
+residence of the American Minister had fired at a German aeroplane
+darting overhead; French troops were drawing in to the northward and
+English soldiers were hurrying up from the south; trainloads of wounded
+had been brought in under cover of the night and distributed among the
+improvised hospitals; but, conceding these things to be true, we knew of
+them only at second hand.  By the evidence of what we ourselves saw we
+were able to note few shifts in the superficial aspects of the city.
+
+The Garde Civique seemed a trifle more numerous than it had been the
+evening before; citizen volunteers, still in civilian garb, appeared on
+the streets in awkward squads, carrying their guns and side arms
+clumsily; and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out the
+beautiful Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high
+barricade across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois;
+also, they were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade trees.
+That was all.
+
+And then, as though to offset these added suggestions of danger, we saw
+children playing about quietly behind the piled sand-bags, guarded by
+plump Flemish nursemaids, and smart dogcarts constantly passed and
+repassed us, filled with well-dressed women, and with flowers stuck in
+the whip-sockets.
+
+The nearer we got to this war the farther away from us it seemed to be.
+We began to regard it as an elusive, silent, secretive, hide-and-go-seek
+war, which would evade us always.  We resolved to pursue it into the
+country to the northward, from whence the Germans were reported to be
+advancing, crushing back the outnumbered Belgians as they came onward;
+but when we tried to secure a laissez passer at the gendarmerie, where
+until then an accredited correspondent might get himself a laissez
+passer, we bumped into obstacles.
+
+In an inclosed courtyard behind a big gray building, among loaded wagons
+of supplies and munching cart horses, a kitchen table teetered
+unsteadily on its legs on the rough cobbles.  On the table were pens and
+inkpots and coffee cups and beer bottles and beer glasses; and about it
+sat certain unkempt men in resplendent but unbrushed costumes. Joseph
+himself--the Joseph of the coat of many colors, no less--might have
+devised the uniforms they wore.  With that setting the picture they made
+there in the courtyard was suggestive of stage scenes in plays of the
+French Revolution.
+
+They were polite enough, these piebald gentlemen, and they considered
+our credentials with an air of mildly courteous interest; but they would
+give us no passes.  There had been an order.  Who had issued it, or why,
+was not for us to know.  Going away from there, all downcast and
+disappointed, we met a French cavalryman.  He limped along in his high
+dragoon boots, walking with the wide-legged gait of one who had
+bestraddled leather for many hours and was sore from it.  His horse,
+which he led by the bridle, stumbled with weariness.  A proud boy scout
+was serving as his guide.  He was the only soldier of any army, except
+the Belgian, we had seen so far, and we halted our car and watched him
+until he disappeared.
+
+However, seeing one tired French dragoon was not seeing the war; and we
+chafed that night at the delay which kept us penned as prisoners in this
+handsome, outwardly quiet city.  As we figured it we might be housed up
+here for days or weeks and miss all the operations in the field.  When
+morning came, though, we discovered that the bars were down again, and
+that certificates signed by the American consul would be sufficient to
+carry us as far as the outlying suburbs at least.
+
+Securing these precious papers, then, without delay we chartered a
+rickety red taxicab for the day; and piling in we told the driver to
+take us eastward as far as he could go before the outposts turned us
+back.  He took us, therefore, at a buzzing clip through the Bois, along
+one flank of the magnificent Forest of Soigne, with its miles of green-
+trunked beech trees, and by way of the royal park of Tervueren.  From
+the edge of the thickly settled district onward we passed barricade
+after barricade--some built of newly felled trees; some of street cars
+drawn across the road in double rows; some of street cobbles chinked
+with turf; and some of barbed wire--all of them, even to our
+inexperienced eyes, seeming but flimsy defenses to interpose against a
+force of any size or determination.  But the Belgians appeared to set
+great store by these playthings.
+
+Behind each of them was a mixed group of soldiers--Garde Civique,
+gendarmes and burgher volunteers.  These latter mainly carried shotguns
+and wore floppy blue caps and long blue blouses, which buttoned down
+their backs with big horn buttons, like little girls' pinafores.  There
+was, we learned, a touch of sentiment about the sudden appearance of
+those most unsoldierly looking vestments.  In the revolution of 1830,
+when the men of Brussels fought the Hollanders all morning, stopped for
+dinner at midday and then fought again all afternoon, and by alternately
+fighting and eating wore out the enemy and won their national
+independence, they wore such caps and such back-buttoning blouses.  And
+so all night long women in the hospitals had sat up cutting out and
+basting together the garments of glory for their menfolk.
+
+No one offered to turn us back, and only once or twice did a sentry
+insist on looking at our passes.  In the light of fuller experiences I
+know now that when a city is about to fall into an enemy's hands the
+authorities relax their vigilance and freely permit noncombatants to
+depart therefrom, presumably on the assumption that the fewer
+individuals there are in the place when the conqueror does come the
+fewer the problems of caring for the resident population will be.  But
+we did not know this mighty significant fact; and, suspecting nothing,
+the four innocents drove blithely on until the city lay behind us and
+the country lay before us, brooding in the bright sunlight and all empty
+and peaceful, except for thin scattering detachments of gaily clad
+Belgian infantrymen through which we passed.
+
+Once or twice tired, dirty stragglers, lying at the roadside, raised a
+cheer as they recognized the small American flag that fluttered from our
+taxi's door; and once we gave a lift to a Belgian bicycle courier, who
+had grown too leg-weary to pedal his machine another inch.  He was the
+color of the dust through which he had ridden, and his face under its
+dirt mask was thin and drawn with fatigue; but his racial enthusiasm
+endured, and when we dropped him he insisted on shaking hands with all
+of us, and offering us a drink out of a very warm and very grimy bottle
+of something or other.
+
+All of a sudden, rounding a bend, we came on a little valley with one of
+the infrequent Belgian brooks bisecting it; and this whole valley was
+full of soldiers.  There must have been ten thousand of them--cavalry,
+foot, artillery, baggage trains, and all.  Quite near us was ranged a
+battery of small rapid-fire guns; and the big rawboned dogs that had
+hauled them there were lying under the wicked-looking little pieces.  We
+had heard a lot about the dog-drawn guns of the Belgians, but these were
+the first of them we had seen.
+
+Lines of cavalrymen were skirting crosswise over the low hill at the
+other side of the valley, and against the sky line the figures of horses
+and men stood out clear and fine.  It all seemed a splendid martial
+sight; but afterward, comparing this force with the army into whose
+front we were to blunder unwittingly, we thought of it as a little
+handful of toy soldiers playing at war.  We never heard what became of
+those Belgians.  Presumably at the advance of the Germans coming down on
+them countlessly, like an Old Testament locust plague, they fell back
+and, going round Brussels, went northward toward Antwerp, to join the
+main body of their own troops.  Or they may have reached the lines of
+the Allies, to the south and westward, toward the French frontier.  One
+guess would be as good as the other.
+
+One of the puzzling things about the early mid-August stages of the war
+was the almost instantaneous rapidity with which the Belgian army, as an
+army, disintegrated and vanished.  To-day it was here, giving a good
+account of itself against tremendous odds, spending itself in driblets
+to give the Allies a chance to get up.  To-morrow it was utterly gone.
+
+Still without being halted or delayed we went briskly on.  We had topped
+the next rise commanding the next valley, and--except for a few
+stragglers and some skirmishers--the Belgians were quite out of sight,
+when our driver stopped with an abruptness which piled his four
+passengers in a heap and pointed off to the northwest, a queer,
+startled, frightened look on his broad Flemish face.  There was smoke
+there along the horizon--much smoke, both white and dark; and, even as
+the throb of the motor died away to a purr, the sound of big guns came
+to us in a faint rumbling, borne from a long way off by the breeze.
+
+It was the first time any one of us, except McCutcheon, had ever heard a
+gun fired in battle; and it was the first intimation to any of us that
+the Germans were so near.  Barring only venturesome mounted scouts we
+had supposed the German columns were many kilometers away.  A brush
+between skirmishers was the best we had counted on seeing.
+
+Right here we parted from our taxi driver.  He made it plain to us,
+partly by words and partly by signs, that he personally was not looking
+for any war.  Plainly he was one who specialized in peace and the
+pursuits of peace.  Not even the proffered bribe of a doubled or a
+tripled fare availed to move him one rod toward those smoke clouds.  He
+turned his car round so that it faced toward Brussels, and there he
+agreed to stay, caring for our light overcoats, until we should return
+to him.  I wonder how long he really did stay.
+
+And I have wondered, in idle moments since, what he did with our
+overcoats.  Maybe he fled with the automobile containing two English
+moving-picture operators which passed us at that moment, and from which
+floated back a shouted warning that the Germans were coming.  Maybe he
+stayed too long and was gobbled up--but I doubt it.  He had an instinct
+for safety.
+
+As we went forward afoot the sound of the firing grew clearer and more
+distinct.  We could now hear quite plainly the grunting belch of the big
+pieces and, in between, the chattering voice of rapid-fire guns.  Long-
+extended, stammering, staccato sounds, which we took to mean rifle
+firing, came to our ears also.  Among ourselves we decided that the
+white smoke came from the guns and the black from burning buildings or
+hay ricks.  Also we agreed that the fighting was going on beyond the
+spires and chimneys of a village on the crest of the hill immediately
+ahead of us.  We could make out a white church and, on past it, lines of
+gray stone cottages.
+
+In these deductions we were partly right and partly wrong; we had hit on
+the approximate direction of the fighting, but it was not a village that
+lay before us.  What we saw was an outlying section of the city of
+Louvain, a place of fifty thousand inhabitants, destined within ten days
+to be turned into a waste of sacked ruins.
+
+There were fields of tall, rank winter cabbages on each side of the
+road, and among the big green leaves we saw bright red dots.  We had to
+look a second time before we realized that these dots were not the
+blooms of the wild red poppies that are so abundant in Belgium, but the
+red-tipped caps of Belgian soldiers squatting in the cover of the
+plants.  None of them looked toward us; all of them looked toward those
+mounting walls of smoke.
+
+Now, too, we became aware of something else--aware of a procession that
+advanced toward us.  It was the head of a two-mile long line of
+refugees, fleeing from destroyed or threatened districts on beyond.  At
+first, in scattered, straggling groups, and then in solid columns, they
+passed us unendingly, we going one way, they going the other.  Mainly
+they were afoot, though now and then a farm wagon would bulk above the
+weaving ranks; and it would be loaded with bedding and furniture and
+packed to overflowing with old women and babies.  One wagon lacked
+horses to draw it, and six men pulled in front while two men pushed at
+the back to propel it.  Some of the fleeing multitude looked like
+townspeople, but the majority plainly were peasants.  And of these
+latter at least half wore wooden shoes so that the sound of their feet
+on the cobbled roadbed made a clattering chorus that at times almost
+drowned out the hiccuping voices of the guns behind them.
+
+Occasionally there would be a man shoving a barrow, with a baby and
+possibly a muddle of bedclothing in the barrow together.  Every woman
+carried a burden of some sort, which might be a pack tied in a cloth or
+a cheap valise stuffed to bursting, or a baby--though generally it was
+a baby; and nearly every man, in addition to his load of belongings, had
+an umbrella under his arm.  In this rainy land the carrying of umbrellas
+is a habit not easily shaken off; and, besides, most of these people had
+slept out at least one night and would probably sleep out another, and
+an umbrella makes a sort of shelter if you have no better.  I figure I
+saw a thousand umbrellas if I saw one, and the sight of them gave a
+strangely incongruous touch to the thing.
+
+Yes, it gave a grotesque touch to it.  The spectacle inclined one to
+laugh, almost making one forget for a moment that here in this spectacle
+one beheld the misery of war made concrete; that in the lorn state of
+these poor folks its effects were focused and made vivid; that, while in
+some way it touched every living creature on the globe, here it touched
+them directly.
+
+All the children, except the sick ones and the very young ones, walked,
+and most of them carried small bundles too.  I saw one little girl, who
+was perhaps six years old, with a heavy wooden clock in her arms.  The
+legs of the children wavered under them sometimes from weakness or maybe
+weariness, but I did not hear a single child whimper, or see a single
+woman who wept, or hear a single man speak above a half whisper.
+
+They drifted on by us, silent all, except for the sound of feet and
+wheels; and, as I read the looks on their faces, those faces expressed
+no emotion except a certain numbed, resigned, bovine bewilderment.  Far
+back in the line we met two cripples, hobbling along side by side as
+though for company, and still farther back a Belgian soldier came, like
+a rear guard, with his gun swung over his back and his sweaty black hair
+hanging down in his eyes.
+
+In an undertone he was apparently explaining something to a little
+bow-legged man in black, with spectacles, who trudged along in his
+company. He was the lone soldier we saw among the refugees--all the
+others were civilians.
+
+Only one man in all the line hailed us.  Speaking so low that we could
+scarcely catch his words, he said in broken English:
+
+"M'sieurs, the French are in Brussels, are they not?"
+
+"No," we told him.
+
+"The British, then--they must be there by now?"
+
+"No; the British aren't there, either."
+
+He shook his head, as though puzzled, and started on.
+
+"How far away are the Germans?" we asked him.
+
+He shook his head again.  "I cannot say," he answered; "but I think they
+must be close behind us.  I had a brother in the army at Liege," he
+added, apparently apropos of nothing.  And then he went on, still
+shaking his head and with both arms tightly clasped round a big bundle
+done up in cloth, which he held against his breast.
+
+Very suddenly the procession broke off, as though it had been chopped in
+two; and almost immediately after that the road turned into a street and
+we were between solid lines of small cottages, surrounded on all sides
+by people who fluttered about with the distracted aimlessness of
+agitated barnyard fowls.  They babbled among themselves, paying small
+heed to us.  An automobile tore through the street with its horn
+blaring, and raced by us, going toward Brussels at forty miles an hour.
+A well-dressed man in the front seat yelled out something to us as he
+whizzed past, but the words were swallowed up in the roaring of his
+engine.
+
+Of our party only one spoke French, and he spoke it indifferently.  We
+sought, therefore, to find some one who understood English.  In a minute
+we saw the black robe of a priest; and here, through the crowd, calm and
+dignified where all others were fairly befuddled with excitement, he
+came--a short man with a fuzzy red beard and a bright blue eye.
+
+We hailed him, and the man who spoke a little French explained our case.
+At once he turned about and took us into a side street; and even in
+their present state the men and women who met us remembered their
+manners and pulled off their hats and bowed before him.
+
+At a door let into a high stone wall he stopped and rang a bell.  A
+brother in a brown robe came and unbarred the gate for us, and our guide
+led us under an arched alley and out again into the open; and behold we
+were in another world from the little world of panic that we had just
+left.  There was a high-walled inclosure with a neglected tennis court
+in the middle, and pear and plum trees burdened with fruit; and at the
+far end, beneath a little arbor of vines, four priests were sitting
+together.  At sight of us they rose and came to us, and shook hands all
+round.  Almost before we knew it we were in a bare little room behind
+the ancient Church of Saint Jacques, and one of the fathers was showing
+us a map in order that we might better understand the lay of the land;
+and another was uncorking a bottle of good red wine, which he brought up
+from the cellar, with a halo of mold on the cork and a mantle of cobwebs
+on its sloping shoulders.
+
+It seemed that the Rev. Dom. Marie-Joseph Montaigne--I give the name
+that was on his card--could speak a little English.  He told us
+haltingly that the smoke we had seen came from a scene of fighting
+somewhere to the eastward of Louvain.  He understood that the Prussians
+were quite near, but he had seen none himself and did not expect they
+would enter the town before nightfall.  As for the firing, that appeared
+to have ceased.  And, sure enough, when we listened we could no longer
+catch the sound of the big guns.  Nor did we hear them again during that
+day.  Over his glass the priest spoke in his faulty English, stopping
+often to feel for a word; and when he had finished his face worked and
+quivered with the emotion he felt.
+
+"This war--it is a most terrible thing that it should come on Belgium,
+eh? Our little country had no quarrel with any great country.  We
+desired only that we should be left alone.
+
+"Our people here--they are not bad people.  I tell you they are very
+good people.  All the week they work and work, and on Sunday they go to
+church; and then maybe they take a little walk.
+
+"You Americans now--you come from a very great country.  Surely, if the
+worst should come America will not let our country perish from off the
+earth, eh! Is not that so?"
+
+Fifteen minutes later we were out again facing the dusty little square
+of Saint Jacques; and now of a sudden peace seemed to have fallen on the
+place.  The wagons of a little traveling circus were ranged in the
+middle of the square with no one about to guard them; and across the way
+was a small tavern.
+
+All together we discovered we were hungry.  We had had bread and cheese
+and coffee, and were lighting some very bad native cigars, when the
+landlord burst in on us, saying in a quavering voice that some one
+passing had told him a squad of seven German troopers had been seen in
+the next street but one.  He made a gesture as though to invoke the
+mercy of Heaven on us all, and ran out again, casting a carpet slipper
+in his flight and leaving it behind him on the floor.
+
+So we followed, not in the least believing that any Germans had really
+been sighted; but in the street we saw a group of perhaps fifty Belgian
+soldiers running up a narrow sideway, trailing their gun butts behind
+them on the stones.  We figured they were hurrying forward to the other
+side of town to help hold back the enemy.
+
+A minute later seven or eight more soldiers crossed the road ahead of us
+and darted up an alley with the air and haste of men desirous of being
+speedily out of sight.  We had gone perhaps fifty feet beyond the mouth
+of this alley when two men, one on horseback and one on a bicycle, rode
+slowly and sedately out of another alley, parallel to the first one, and
+swung about with their backs to us.
+
+I imagine we had watched the newcomers for probably fifty seconds before
+it dawned on any of us that they wore gray helmets and gray coats, and
+carried arms--and were Germans.  Precisely at that moment they both
+turned so that they faced us; and the man on horseback lifted a carbine
+from a holster and half swung it in our direction.
+
+Realization came to us that here we were, pocketed.  There were armed
+Belgians in an alley behind us and armed Germans in the street before
+us; and we were nicely in between.  If shooting started the enemies
+might miss each other, but they could not very well miss us.  Two of our
+party found a courtyard and ran through it.  The third pressed close up
+against a house front and I made for the half-open door of a shop.
+
+Just as I reached it a woman on the inside slammed it in my face and
+locked it.  I never expect to see her again; but that does not mean that
+I ever expect to forgive her.  The next door stood open, and from within
+its shelter I faced about to watch for what might befall.  Nothing
+befell except that the Germans rode slowly past me, both vigilantly keen
+in poise and look, both with weapons unshipped.
+
+I got an especially good view of the cavalry.  He was a tall, lean,
+blond young man, man with a little yellow mustache and high cheekbones
+like an Indian's; and he was sunburned until he was almost as red as an
+Indian.  The sight of that limping French dragoon the day before had
+made me think of a picture by Meissonier or Détaille, but this German
+put me in mind of one of Frederic Remington's paintings.  Change his
+costume a bit, and substitute a slouch hat for his flat-topped lancer's
+cap, and he might have cantered bodily out of one of Remington's
+canvases.
+
+He rode past me--he and his comrade on the wheel--and in an instant they
+were gone into another street, and the people who had scurried to cover
+at their coming were out again behind them, with craned necks and
+startled faces.
+
+Our group reassembled itself somehow and followed after those two
+Germans who could jog along so serenely through a hostile town.  We did
+not crowd them--our health forbade that--but we now desired above all
+things to get back to our taxicab, two miles or more away, before our
+line of retreat should be cut off.  But we had tarried too long at our
+bread and cheese.
+
+When we came to where the street leading to the Square of Saint Jacques
+joined the street that led in turn to the Brussels road, all the people
+there were crouching in their doorways as quiet as so many mice, all
+looking in the direction in which we hoped to go, all pointing with
+their hands.  No one spoke, but the scuffle of wooden-shod feet on the
+flags made a sliding, slithering sound, which someway carried a message
+of warning more forcible than any shouted word or sudden shriek.
+
+We looked where their fingers aimed, and, as we looked, a hundred feet
+away through a cloud of dust a company of German foot soldiers swung
+across an open grassplot, where a little triangular park was, and
+straightened out down the road to Brussels, singing snatches of a German
+marching song as they went.
+
+And behind them came trim officers on handsome, high-headed horses, and
+more infantry; then a bicycle squad; then cavalry, and then a light
+battery, bumping along over the rutted stones, with white dust blowing
+back from under its wheels in scrolls and pennons.
+
+Then a troop of Uhlans came, with nodding lances, following close behind
+the guns; and at sight of them a few men and women, clustered at the
+door of a little wine shop calling itself the Belgian Lion, began to
+hiss and mutter, for among these people, as we knew already, the Uhlans
+had a hard name.
+
+At that a noncommissioned officer--a big man with a neck on him like a
+bison and a red, broad, menacing face--turned in his saddle and dropped
+the muzzle of his black automatic on them.  They sucked their hisses
+back down their frightened gullets so swiftly that the exertion
+well-nigh choked them, and shrank flat against the wall; and, for all
+the sound that came from them until he had holstered his hardware and
+trotted on, they might have been dead men and women.
+
+Just then, from perhaps half a mile on ahead, a sharp clatter of rifle
+fire sounded--pop! pop! pop!--and then a rattling volley.  We saw the
+Uhlans snatch out their carbines and gallop forward past the battery
+into the dust curtain.  And as it swallowed them up we, who had come in
+a taxicab looking for the war, knew that we had found it; and knew, too,
+that our chances of ever seeing that taxicab again were most exceeding
+small.
+
+We had one hope--that this might merely be a reconnaissance in force,
+and that when it turned back or turned aside we might yet slip through
+and make for Brussels afoot.  But it was no reconnaissance--it was
+Germany up and moving.  We stayed in Louvain three days, and for three
+days we watched the streaming past of the biggest army we had ever seen,
+and the biggest army beleaguered Belgium had ever seen, and one of the
+biggest, most perfect armies the world has ever seen.  We watched the
+gray-clad columns pass until the mind grew numb at the prospect of
+computing their number.  To think of trying to count them was like
+trying to count the leaves on a tree or the pebbles on a path.
+
+They came and came, and kept on coming, and their iron-shod feet flailed
+the earth to powder, and there was no end to them.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+Sherman Said It
+
+
+Undoubtedly Sherman said it.  This is my text and as illustration for
+my text I take the case of the town of La Buissière.
+
+The Germans took the town of La Buissière after stiff fighting on August
+twenty-fourth.  I imagine that possibly there was a line in the
+dispatches telling of the fight there; but at that I doubt it, because
+on that same date a few miles away a real battle was raging between the
+English rear guard, under Sir John French, of the retreating army of the
+Allies, falling back into France, and the Germans.  Besides, in the sum
+total of this war the fall of La Buissière hardly counts.  You might say
+it represents a semicolon in the story of the campaign.  Probably no
+future historian will give it so much as a paragraph. In our own Civil
+War it would have been worth a page in the records anyway.  Here upward
+of three hundred men on both sides were killed and wounded, and as many
+more Frenchmen were captured; and the town, when taken, gave the winners
+the control of the river Sambre for many miles east and west. Here,
+also, was a German charge with bayonets up a steep and well-defended
+height; and after that a hand-to-hand melee with the French defenders on
+the poll of the hill.
+
+But this war is so big a thing, as wars go, that an engagement of this
+size is likely to be forgotten in a day or a week.  Yet, I warrant you,
+the people of La Buissière will not forget it.  Nor shall we forget it
+who came that way in the early afternoon of a flawless summer day.  Let
+me try to recreate La Buissière for you, reader.  Here the Sambre, a
+small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized
+creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and
+weSt. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond
+like the rim of a saucer.  The town--most of it--is on this side.  On
+the south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy
+feet high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau,
+where trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander
+between fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar
+beets.  As for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people--
+Walloons and Flemish folk--living in tall, bleak, stone houses built
+flush with the little crooked streets.  Invariably these houses are of a
+whitish gray color; almost invariably they are narrow and cramped-
+looking, with very peaky gables, somehow suggesting flat-chested old men
+standing in close rows, with their hands in their pockets and their
+shoulders shrugged up.
+
+A canal bisects one corner of the place, and spanning the river there
+are--or were--three bridges, one for the railroad and two for foot and
+vehicular travel.  There is a mill which overhangs the river--the
+biggest building in the town--and an ancient gray convent, not quite so
+large as the mill; and, of course, a church.  In most of the houses
+there are tiny shops on the lower floors, and upstairs are the homes of
+the people.  On the northern side of the stream every tillable foot of
+soil is under cultivation.  There are flower beds, and plum and pear
+trees in the tiny grass plots alongside the more pretentious houses, and
+the farm lands extend to where the town begins.
+
+This, briefly, is La Buissière as it looked before the war began--a
+little, drowsy settlement of dull, frugal, hard-working, kindly
+Belgians, minding their own affairs, prospering in their own small way,
+and having no quarrel with the outside world.  They lived in the only
+corner of Europe that I know of where serving people decline to accept
+tips for rendering small services; and in a simple, homely fashion are,
+I think, the politest, the most courteous, the most accommodating human
+beings on the face of the earth.
+
+Even their misery did not make them forget their manners, as we found
+when we came that way, close behind the conquerors.  It was only the
+refugees, fleeing from their homes or going back to them again, who were
+too far spent to lift their caps in answer to our hails, and too
+miserably concerned with their own ruined affairs, or else too afraid of
+inquisitive strangers, to answer the questions we sometimes put to them.
+
+We were three days getting from Brussels to La Buissière--a distance, I
+suppose, of about forty-five English miles.  There were no railroads and
+no trams for us.  The lines were held by the Germans or had been
+destroyed by the Allies as they fell back.  Nor were there automobiles
+to be had.  Such automobiles as were not hidden had been confiscated by
+one side or the other.
+
+Moreover, our journey was a constant succession of stops and starts.
+Now we would be delayed for half an hour while some German officer
+examined the passes we carried, he meantime eying us with his suspicious
+squinted eyes.  Now again we would halt to listen to some native's story
+of battle or reprisal on ahead.  And always there was the everlasting
+dim reverberation of the distant guns to draw us forward.  And always,
+too, there was the difficulty of securing means of transportation.
+
+It was on Sunday afternoon, August twenty-third, when we left Brussels,
+intending to ride to Waterloo.  There were six of us, in two ancient
+open carriages designed like gravy boats and hauled by gaunt livery
+horses.  Though the Germans had held Brussels for four days now, life in
+the suburbs went on exactly as it goes on in the suburbs of a Belgian
+city in ordinary times.  There was nothing to suggest war or a captured
+city in the family parties sitting at small tables before the outlying
+cafes or strolling decorously under the trees that shaded every road.
+Even the Red Cross flags hanging from the windows of many of the larger
+houses seemed for once in keeping with the peaceful picture.  Of Germans
+during the afternoon we saw almost none.  Thick enough in the center of
+the town, the gray backs showed themselves hardly at all in the
+environs.
+
+At the city line a small guard lounged on benches before a wine shop.
+They stood up as we drew near, but changed their minds and squatted down
+without challenging us to produce the safe-conduct papers that Herr
+General Major Thaddeus von Jarotzky, sitting in due state in the ancient
+Hotel de Ville, had bestowed on us an hour before.
+
+Just before we reached Waterloo we saw in a field on the right, near the
+road, a small camp of German cavalry.  The big, round-topped yellow
+tents, sheltering twenty men each and looking like huge tortoises, stood
+in a line.  From the cook-wagons, modeled on the design of those carried
+by an American circus, came the heavy, meaty smells of stews boiling in
+enormous caldrons.  The men were lying or sitting on straw piles,
+singing German marching songs as they waited for their supper.  It was
+always so--whenever and wherever we found German troops at rest they
+were singing, eating or drinking--or doing all three at once.  A German
+said to me afterwards:
+
+"Why do we win? Three things are winning for us--good marching, good
+shooting and good cooking; but most of all the cooking.  When our troops
+stop there is always plenty of hot food for them.  We never have to
+fight on an empty stomach--we Germans."
+
+These husky singers were the last Germans we were to see for many hours;
+for between the garrison force left behind in Brussels and the fast-
+moving columns hurrying to meet the English and the French and a few
+Belgians--on the morrow--a matter of many leagues now intervened.
+
+Evidence of the passing through of the troops was plentiful enough
+though.  We saw it in the trampled hedges; in the empty beer bottles
+that dotted the roadside ditches--empty bottles, as we had come to know,
+meant Germans on ahead; in the subdued, furtive attitude of the country
+folk, and, most of all, in the chalked legend, in stubby German script--
+"Gute Leute!"--on nearly every wine-shop shutter or cottage door.
+Soldiers quartered in such a house overnight had on leaving written this
+line--"Good people!"--to indicate the peaceful character of the
+dwellers therein and to commend them to the kindness of those who might
+follow after.
+
+The Lion of Waterloo, standing on its lofty green pyramid, was miles
+behind us before realization came that fighting had started that day to
+the southward of us.  We halted at a taverne to water the horses, and
+out came its Flemish proprietor, all gesticulations and exclamations, to
+tell us that since morning he had heard firing on ahead.
+
+"Ah, sirs," he said, "it was inconceivable--that sound of the guns.  It
+went on for hours. The whole world must be at war down the road!"
+
+The day before he had seen, flitting across the cabbage patches and
+dodging among the elm trees, a skirmish party, mounted, which he took to
+be English; and for two days, so he said, the Germans had been passing
+the tavern in numbers uncountable.
+
+We hurried on then, but as we met many peasants, all coming the other
+way afoot and all with excited stories of a supposed battle ahead, and
+as we ourselves now began to catch the faint reverberations of cannon
+fire, our drivers manifested a strange reluctance about proceeding
+farther.  And when, just at dusk, we clattered into the curious little
+convent-church town of Nivelles, and found the tiny square before the
+Black Eagle Inn full of refugees who had trudged in from towns beyond,
+the liverymen, after taking off their varnished high hats to scratch
+their preplexed heads, announced that Brussels was where they belonged
+and to Brussels they would return that night, though their spent horses
+dropped in the traces on the way.
+
+We supped that night at the Black Eagle--slept there too--and it was at
+supper we had as guests Raymond Putzeys, aged twelve, and Alfred, his
+father.  Except crumbs of chocolate and pieces of dry bread, neither of
+them had eaten for two days.
+
+The boy, who was a round-faced, handsome, dirty, polite little chap,
+said not a word except "Merci!" He was too busy clearing his plate clean
+as fast as we loaded it with ham and eggs and plum jam; and when he had
+eaten enough for three and could hold no more he went to sleep, with his
+tousled head among the dishes.
+
+The father between bites told us his tale--such a tale as we had heard
+dozens of times already and were to hear again a hundred times before
+that crowded week ended--he telling it with rolling eyes and lifting
+brows, and graphic and abundant gestures.  Behind him and us, penning
+our table about with a living hedge, stood the leading burghers of
+Nivelles, now listening to him, now watching us with curious eyes.  And,
+as he talked on, the landlord dimmed the oil lamps and made fast the
+door; for this town, being in German hands, was under martial law and
+must lock and bar itself in at eight o'clock each night.  So we sat in a
+half light and listened.
+
+They lived, the two Putzeys, at a hamlet named Marchienne-au-Pont, to
+the southward. The Germans had come into it the day before at sunup, and
+finding the French there had opened fire.  From the houses the French
+had replied until driven out by heavy odds, and then they ran across the
+fields, leaving many dead and wounded behind them.  As for the
+inhabitants they had, during the fighting, hidden in their cellars.
+
+"When the French were gone the Germans drove us out," went on the
+narrator; "and, of the men, they made several of us march ahead of them
+down the road into the next village, we holding up our hands and loudly
+begging those within the houses not to fire, for fear of killing us who
+were their friends and neighbors.  When this town surrendered the
+Germans let us go, but first one of them gave me a cake of chocolate.
+
+"Yet when I tried to go to aid a wounded Frenchman who lay in the
+fields, another German, I thought, fired at me.  I heard the bullet--it
+buzzed like a hornet.  So then I ran away and found my son here; and we
+came across the country, following the canals and avoiding the roads,
+which were filled with German troops.  When we had gone a mile we looked
+back and there was much thick smoke behind us--our houses were burning,
+I suppose.  So last night we slept in the woods and all day we walked,
+and to-night reached here, bringing with us nothing except the clothes
+on our backs.
+
+"I have no wife--she has been dead for two years--but in Brussels I have
+two daughters at school.  Do you think I shall be permitted to enter
+Brussels and seek for my two daughters? This morning they told me
+Brussels was burning; but that I do not believe."
+
+Then, also, he told us in quick, eager sentences, lowering his voice
+while he spoke, that a priest, with his hands tied behind his back, had
+been driven through a certain village ahead of the Germans, as a human
+shield for them; and that, in still another village, two aged women had
+been violated and murdered.  Had he beheld these things with his own
+eyes? No; he had been told of them.
+
+Here I might add that this was our commonest experience in questioning
+the refugees. Every one of them had a tale to tell of German atrocities
+on noncombatants; but not once did we find an avowed eye-witness to such
+things.  Always our informant had heard of the torturing or the maiming
+or the murdering, but never had he personally seen it.  It had always
+happened in another town--never in his own town.
+
+We hoped to hire fresh vehicles of some sort in Nivelles.  Indeed, a
+half-drunken burgher who spoke fair English, and who, because he had
+once lived in America, insisted on taking personal charge of our
+affairs, was constantly bustling in to say he had arranged for carriages
+and horses; but when the starting hour came--at five o'clock on Monday
+morning--there was no sign either of our fuddled guardian or of the rigs
+he had promised.  So we set out afoot, following the everlasting sound
+of the guns.
+
+After having many small adventures on the way we came at nightfall to
+Binche, a town given over to dullness and lacemaking, and once a year to
+a masked carnival, but which now was jammed with German supply trains,
+and by token of this latter circumstance filled with apprehensive
+townspeople.  But there had been no show of resistance here, and no
+houses had been burned; and the Germans were paying freely for what they
+took and treating the townspeople civilly.
+
+Indeed, all that day we had traveled through a district as yet unharried
+and unmolested. Though sundry hundreds of thousands of Germans had gone
+that way, no burnt houses or squandered fields marked their wake; and
+the few peasants who had not run away at the approach of the dreaded
+Allemands were back at work, trying to gather their crops in barrows or
+on their backs, since they had no work-cattle left.  For these the
+Germans had taken from them, to the last fit horse and the last colt.
+
+At Binche we laid up two nights and a day for the curing of our
+blistered feet.  Also, here we bought our two flimsy bicycles and our
+decrepit dogcart, and our still more decrepit mare to haul it; and, with
+this equipment, on Wednesday morning, bright and early, we made a fresh
+start, heading now toward Maubeuge, across the French boundary.
+
+Current rumor among the soldiers at Binche--for the natives, seemingly
+through fear for their own skins, would tell us nothing--was that at
+Maubeuge the onward-pressing Germans had caught up with the withdrawing
+columns of the Allies and were trying to bottle the stubborn English
+rear guard.  For once the gossip of the privates and the noncommissioned
+officers proved to be true.  There was fighting that day near Maubeuge--
+hard fighting and plenty of it; but, though we got within five miles of
+it, and heard the guns and saw the smoke from them, we were destined not
+to get there.
+
+Strung out, with the bicycles in front, we went down the straight white
+road that ran toward the frontier.  After an hour or two of steady going
+we began to notice signs of the retreat that had trailed through this
+section forty-eight hours before.  We picked up a torn shoulder strap,
+evidently of French workmanship, which had 13 embroidered on it in faded
+red tape; and we found, behind the trunk of a tree, a knapsack, new but
+empty, which was too light to have been part of a German soldier's
+equipment.
+
+We thought it was French; but now I think it must have been Belgian,
+because, as we subsequently discovered, a few scattering detachments of
+the Belgian foot soldiers who fled from Brussels on the eve of the
+occupation--disappearing so completely and so magically--made their way
+westward and southward to the French lines, toward Mons, and enrolled
+with the Allies in the last desperate effort to dam off and stem back
+the German torrent.
+
+Also, in a hedge, was a pair of new shoes, with their mouths gaping open
+and their latchets hanging down like tongues, as though hungering for
+feet to go into them.  But not a shred or scrap of German belongings--
+barring only the empty bottles--did we see.
+
+The marvelous German system, which is made up of a million small things
+to form one great, complete thing, ordained that never, either when
+marching or after camping, or even after fighting, should any object,
+however worthless, be discarded, lest it give to hostile eyes some hint
+as to the name of the command or the extent of its size.  These Germans
+we were trailing cleaned up behind themselves as carefully as New
+England housewives.
+
+It may have been the German love of order and regularity that induced
+them even to avoid trampling the ripe grain in the fields wherever
+possible.  Certainly, except when dealing out punishment, they did
+remarkably little damage, considering their numbers, along their line of
+march through this lowermost strip of Belgium.
+
+At Merbes-Ste.-Marie, a matter of six kilometers from Binche, we came on
+the first proof of seeming wantonness we encountered that day.  An old
+woman sat in a doorway of what had been a wayside wine shop, guarding
+the pitiable ruin of her stock and fixtures. All about her on the floor
+was a litter of foul straw, muddied by many feet and stained with
+spilled drink.  The stench from a bloated dead cavalry horse across the
+road poisoned the air.  The woman said a party of private soldiers,
+straying back from the main column, had despoiled her, taking what they
+pleased of her goods and in pure vandalism destroying what they could
+not use.
+
+Her shop was ruined, she said.  With a gesture of both arms, as though
+casting something from her, she expressed how utter and complete was her
+ruin.  Also she was hungry--she and her children--for the Germans had
+eaten all the food in the house and all the food in the houses of her
+neighbors.  We could not feed her, for we had no stock of provisions
+with us; but we gave her a five-franc piece and left her calling down
+the blessings of the saints on us in French-Flemish.
+
+The sister village of Merbes-le-Chateau, another kilometer farther on,
+revealed to us all its doors and many of its windows caved in by blows
+of gun butts and, at the nearer end of the principal street, five houses
+in smoking ruins.  A group of men and women were pawing about in the
+wreckage, seeking salvage.  They had saved a half-charred washstand, a
+scorched mattress, a clock and a few articles of women's wear; and these
+they had piled in a mound on the edge of the road.
+
+At first, not knowing who we were, they stood mute, replying to
+questions only with shrugged shoulders and lifted eyebrows; but when we
+made them realize that we were Americans they changed.  All were ready
+enough to talk then; they crowded about us, gesticulating and
+interrupting one another.  From the babble we gathered that the German
+skirmishers, coming in the strength of one company, had found an English
+cavalry squad in the town.  The English had swapped a few volleys with
+them, then had fallen back toward the river in good order and without
+loss.
+
+The Germans, pushing in, had burned certain outlying houses from which
+shots had come and burst open the rest. Also they had repeated the trick
+of capturing sundry luckless natives and, in their rush through the
+town, driving these prisoners ahead of them as living bucklers to
+minimize the danger of being shot at from the windows.
+
+One youth showed us a raw wound in his ear.  A piece of tile, splintered
+by an errant bullet, had pierced it, he said, as the Germans drove him
+before them.  Another man told us his father--and the father must have
+been an old man, for the speaker himself was in his fifties--had been
+shot through the thigh.  But had anybody been killed? That was what we
+wanted to know.  Ah, but yes! A dozen eager fingers pointed to the house
+immediately behind us.  There a man had been killed.
+
+Coming back to try to save some of their belongings after the Germans
+had gone through, these others had found him at the head of the cellar
+steps in his blazing house. His throat had been cut and his blood was on
+the floor, and he was dead.  They led us into the shell of the place,
+the stone walls being still staunchly erect; but the roof was gone, and
+in the cinders and dust on the planks of an inner room they showed us a
+big dull-brown smear.
+
+This, they told us, pointing, was the place where he lay.  One man in
+pantomime acted out the drama of the discovery of the body.  He was a
+born actor, that Belgian villager, and an orator--with his hands.
+Somehow, watching him, I visualized the victim as a little man, old and
+stoop-shouldered and feeble in his movements.
+
+I looked about the room.  The corner toward the road was a black ruin,
+but the back wall was hardly touched by the marks of the fire.
+
+On a mantel small bits of pottery stood intact, and a holy picture on
+the wall--a cheap print of a saint--was not even singed.  At the foot of
+the cellar steps curdled milk stood in pans; and beside the milk, on a
+table, was a half-moon of cheese and a long knife.
+
+We wanted to know why the man who lived here had been killed.  They
+professed ignorance then--none of them knew, or, at least, none of them
+would say.  A little later a woman told us she had heard the Germans
+caught him watching from a window with a pair of opera glasses, and on
+this evidence took him for a spy.  But we could secure no direct
+evidence either to confirm the tale or to disprove it.
+
+We got to the center of the town, leaving the venerable nag behind to be
+baited at a big gray barn by a big, shapeless, kindly woman hostler
+whose wooden shoes clattered on the round cobbles of her stable yard
+like drum taps.
+
+In the Square, after many citizens had informed us there was nothing to
+eat, a little Frenchwoman took pity on our emptiness, and, leading us to
+a parlor behind a shop where she sold, among other things, post cards,
+cheeses and underwear, she made us a huge omelet and gave us also good
+butter and fresh milk and a pot of her homemade marmalade.  Her two
+little daughters, who looked as though they had escaped from a Frans
+Hals canvas, waited on us while we wolfed the food down.
+
+Quite casually our hostess showed us a round hole in the window behind
+us, a big white scar in the wooden inner shutter and a flattened chunk
+of lead.  The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown,
+had fired a bullet through the window of her house.  It was proof of the
+rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to
+sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident
+quietly.  Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a
+stray bullet or two through her back window? So we interpreted her
+attitude.
+
+It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at Merbes-le-
+Chateau, but to go off at an angle to La Buissière, where she had heard
+one bridge still stood.  She said nothing of a fight at that place.  It
+is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two towns almost
+touched.  Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the people so
+concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that they seemed
+not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or two miles away
+had fared.
+
+Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissière to find
+the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also,
+and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on which
+we stumbled.
+
+Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond
+the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth
+with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which,
+after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and
+might become a pestilence.  When we told them we meant to enter La
+Buissière they held up their soiled hands in protest.
+
+"There has been much fighting there," one said, "and many are dead, and
+more are dying.  Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we
+do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are
+full of Germans.  Hark, m'sieurs!"
+
+Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause, a
+second report.  We went forward cautiously across a bridge that spanned
+an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with broken
+windows, from which no sign or sound of life came. Suddenly at a turn
+three German privates of a lancer regiment faced us.  They were burdened
+with bottles of beer, and one carried his lance, which he flung
+playfully in our path.  He had been drinking and was jovially
+exhilarated.  As soon as he saw the small silk American flag that
+fluttered from the rail of our dogcart he and his friends became
+enthusiastic in their greetings, offering us beer and wanting to know
+whether the Americans meant to declare for Germany now that the Japanese
+had sided with England.
+
+Leaving them cheering for the Americans we negotiated another elbow in
+the twisting street--and there all about us was the aftermath and
+wreckage of a spirited fight.
+
+Earlier in this chapter I told--or tried to tell--how La Buissière must
+have looked in peaceful times.  I shall try now to tell how it actually
+looked that afternoon we rode into it.
+
+In the center of the town the main street opens out to form an irregular
+circle, and the houses fronting it make a compact ring.  Through a gap
+one gets a glimpse of the little river which one has just crossed; and
+on the river bank stands the mill, or what is left of it, and that is
+little enough.  Its roof is gone, shot clear away in a shower of
+shattered tiling, and its walls are breached in a hundred places.  It is
+pretty certain that mill will never grind grist again.
+
+On its upper floor, which is now a sieve, the Germans--so they
+themselves told us--found, after the fighting, the seventy-year-old
+miller, dead, with a gun in his hands and a hole in his head.  He had
+elected to help the French defend the place; and it was as well for him
+that he fell fighting, because, had he been taken alive, the Prussians,
+following their grim rule for all civilians caught with weapons, would
+have stood him up against a wall with a firing squad before him.
+
+The houses round about have fared better, in the main, than the mill,
+though none of them has come scatheless out of the fight.  Hardly a
+windowpane is whole; hardly a wall but is pocked by bullets or rent by
+larger missiles.  Some houses have lost roofs; some have lost side
+walls, so that one can gaze straight into them and see the cluttered
+furnishings, half buried in shattered masonry and crumbled plaster.
+
+One small cottage has been blown clear away in a blast of artillery
+fire; only the chimney remains, pointing upward like a stubby finger.  A
+fireplace, with a fire in it, is the glowing heart of a house; and a
+chimney completes it and reveals that it is a home fit for human
+creatures to live in; but we see here--and the truth of it strikes us as
+it never did before--that a chimney standing alone typifies desolation
+and ruin more fitly, more brutally, than any written words could typify
+it.
+
+Everywhere there are soldiers--German soldiers--in their soiled, dusty
+gray service uniforms, always in heavy boots; always with their tunics
+buttoned to the throat.  Some, off duty, are lounging at ease in the
+doors of the houses.  More, on duty, are moving about briskly in squads,
+with fixed bayonets.  One is learning to ride a bicycle, and when he
+falls off, as he does repeatedly, his comrades laugh at him and shout
+derisive advice at him.
+
+There are not many of the townsfolk in sight.  Experience has taught us
+that in any town not occupied by the enemy our appearance will be the
+signal for an immediate gathering of the citizens, all flocking about
+us, filled with a naive, respectful inquisitiveness, and wanting to know
+where we have come from and to what place we are going.  Here in this
+stricken town not a single villager comes near us.  A priest passes us,
+bows deeply to us, and in an instant is gone round a jog in the street,
+the skirts of his black robe flicking behind him.  From upper windows
+faces peer out at us--faces of women and children mostly.  In nearly
+every one of these faces a sort of cow-like bewilderment expresses
+itself--not grief, not even resentment, but merely a stupefied
+wonderment at the astounding fact that their town, rather than some
+other town, should be the town where the soldiers of other nations come
+to fight out their feud.  We have come to know well that look these last
+few days.  So far as we have seen there has been no mistreatment of
+civilians by the soldiers; yet we note that the villagers stay inside
+the shelter of their damaged homes as though they felt safer there.  A
+young officer bustles up, spick and span in his tan boots and tan
+gloves, and, finding us to be Americans and correspondents, becomes
+instantly effusive.  He has just come through his first fight, seemingly
+with some credit to himself; and he is proud of the part he has played
+and is pleased to talk about it.  Of his own accord he volunteers to
+lead us to the heights back of the town where the French defenses were
+and where the hand-to-hand fighting took place.
+
+As we trail along behind him in single file we pass a small paved court
+before a stable and see a squad of French prisoners.  Later we are to
+see several thousand French prisoners; but now the sight is at once a
+sensation and a novelty to us.  These are all French prisoners; there
+are no Belgians or Englishmen among them.  In their long, cumbersome
+blue coats and baggy red pants they are huddled down against a wall in a
+heap of straw.  They lie there silently, chewing straws and looking very
+forlorn.  Four German soldiers with fixed bayonets are guarding them.
+
+The young lieutenant leads us along a steeply ascending road over a
+ridge and then stops; and as we look about us the consciousness strikes
+home to us, with almost the jar of a physical blow, that we are standing
+where men have lately striven together and have fallen and died.
+
+In front of us and below us is the town, with the river winding into it
+at the east and out of it at the west; and beyond the town, to the
+north, is the cup-shaped valley of fair, fat farm lands, all heavy and
+pregnant with un-garnered, ungathered crops.  Behind us, on the front of
+the hill, is a hedge, and beyond the hedge--just a foot or so back of
+it, in fact--is a deep trench, plainly dug out by hand, and so lately
+done that the cut clods are still moist and fresh-looking.  At the first
+instant of looking it seems to us that this intrenchment is full of dead
+men; but when we look closer we see that what we take for corpses are
+the scattered garments and equipments of French infantrymen--long blue
+coats; peaked, red-topped caps; spare shirts; rifled knapsacks; water-
+bottles; broken guns; side arms; bayonet belts and blanket rolls.  There
+are perhaps twenty guns in sight.  Each one has been rendered useless by
+being struck against the earth with sufficient force to snap the stock
+at the grip.
+
+Almost at my feet is a knapsack, ripped open and revealing a card of
+small china buttons, a new red handkerchief, a gray-striped flannel
+shirt, a pencil and a sheaf of writing paper.  Rummaging in the main
+compartment I find, folded at the back, a book recording the name and
+record of military service of one Gaston Michel Miseroux, whose home is
+at Amiens, and who is--or was--a private in the Tenth Battalion of the
+---- Regiment of Chasseurs a Pied.  Whether this Gaston Michel Miseroux
+got away alive without his knapsack, or whether he was captured or was
+killed, there is none to say.  His service record is here in the
+trampled dust and he is gone.
+
+Before going farther the young lieutenant, speaking in his broken
+English, told us the story of the fight, which had been fought, he said,
+just forty-eight hours before.  "The French," he said, "must have been
+here for several days.  They had fortified this hill, as you see;
+digging intrenchments in front for their riflemen and putting their
+artillery behind at a place I shall presently show you.  Also they had
+placed many of their sharpshooters in the houses.  It was a strong
+position, commanding the passage of the river, and they should have been
+able to hold it against twice their number.
+
+"Our men came, as you did, along that road off yonder; and then our
+infantry advanced across the fields under cover of our artillery fire.
+We were in the open and the French were above us here and behind
+shelter; and so we lost many men.
+
+"They had mined the bridge over the canal and also the last remaining
+bridge across the river; but we came so fast that we took both bridges
+before they could set off the mines.
+
+"In twenty minutes we held the town and the last of their sharpshooters
+in the houses had been dislodged or killed.  Then, while our guns moved
+over there to the left and shelled them on the flank, two companies of
+Germans--five hundred men--charged up the steep road over which you have
+just climbed and took this trench here in five minutes of close
+fighting.
+
+"The enemy lost many men here before they ran.  So did we lose many.  On
+that spot there"--he pointed to a little gap in the hedge, not twenty
+feet away, where the grass was pressed flat--"I saw three dead men lying
+in a heap.
+
+"We pushed the French back, taking a few prisoners as we went, until on
+the other side of this hill our artillery began to rake them, and then
+they gave way altogether and retreated to the south, taking their guns.
+Remember, they outnumbered us and they had the advantage of position;
+but we whipped them--we Germans--as we always do whip our enemies."
+
+His voice changed from boasting to pity:
+
+"Ach, but it was shameful that they should have been sent against us
+wearing those long blue coats, those red trousers, those shiny black
+belts and bright brass buttons! At a mile, or even half a mile, the
+Germans in their dark-gray uniforms, with dull facings, fade into the
+background; but a Frenchman in his foolish monkey clothes is a target
+for as far as you can see him.
+
+"And their equipment--see how flimsy it is when compared with ours! And
+their guns--so inferior, so old-fashioned alongside the German guns! I
+tell you this: Forty-four years they have been wishing to fight us for
+what we did in 1870; and when the time comes they are not ready and we
+are ready.  While they have been singing their Marseillaise Hymn, we
+have been thinking.  While they have been talking, we have been
+working."
+
+Next he escorted us back along the small plateau that extended south
+from the face of the bluff.  We made our way through a constantly
+growing confusion of abandoned equipment and garments--all the flotsam
+and jetsam of a rout.  I suppose we saw as many as fifty smashed French
+rifles, as many as a hundred and fifty canteens and knapsacks.
+
+Crossing a sunken road, where trenches for riflemen to kneel in and fire
+from had been dug in the sides of the bank--a road our guide said was
+full of dead men after the fight--we came very soon to the site of the
+French camp.  Here, from the medley and mixture of an indescribable
+jumble of wreckage, certain objects stand out, as I write this, detached
+and plain in my mind; such things, for example, as a straw basket of
+twelve champagne bottles with two bottles full and ten empty; a box of
+lump sugar, broken open, with a stain of spilled red wine on some of the
+white cubes; a roll of new mattresses jammed into a natural receptacle
+at the root of an oak tree; a saber hilt of shining brass with the blade
+missing; a whole set of pewter knives and forks sown broadcast on the
+bruised and trampled grass.  But there was no German relic in the lot
+--you may be sure of that.  Farther down, where the sunken road again
+wound across our path, we passed an old-fashioned family carriage jammed
+against the bank, with one shaft snapped off short.  Lying on the dusty
+seat-cushion was a single silver teaspoon.
+
+Almost opposite the carriage, against the other bank, was a cavalryman's
+boot; it had been cut from a wounded limb.  The leather had been split
+all the way down the leg from the top to the ankle, and the inside of
+the boot was full of clotted, dried blood.  And just as we turned back
+to return to the town I saw a child's stuffed cloth doll--rag dolls I
+think they call them in the States--lying flat in the road; and a wagon
+wheel or a camion wheel had passed over the head, squashing it flat.
+
+I am not striving for effect when I tell of this trifle.  When you write
+of such things as a battlefield you do not need to strive for effect.
+The effects are all there, ready-made, waiting to be set down.  Nor do I
+know how a child's doll came to be in that harried, uptorn place.  I
+only know it was there, and being there it seemed to me to sum up the
+fate of little Belgium in this great war.  If I had been seeking a
+visible symbol of Belgium's case I do not believe I could have found a
+more fitting one anywhere.
+
+Going down the hill to the town we met, skirting across our path, a
+party of natives wearing Red Cross distinguishments.  The lieutenant
+said these men had undoubtedly been beating the woods and grain fields
+for the scattered wounded or dead.  He added, without emotion, that from
+time to time they found one such; in fact, the volunteer searchers had
+brought in two Frenchmen just before we arrived--one to be cared for at
+the hospital, the other to be buried.
+
+We had thanked the young lieutenant and had bade him good-by, and were
+starting off again, hoping to make Maubeuge before night, when suddenly
+it struck me that the one thing about La Buissière I should recall most
+vividly was not the sight of it, all stricken and stunned and forlorn as
+it was, but the stench of it.
+
+Before this my eyes had been so busy recording impressions that my nose
+had neglected its duty; now for the first time I sensed the vile reek
+that arose from all about me.  The place was one big, horrid stink.  It
+smelled of ether and iodoform and carbolic acid--there being any number
+of improvised hospitals, full of wounded, in sight; it smelled of sour
+beef bones and stale bread and moldy hay and fresh horse dung; it
+smelled of the sweaty bodies of the soldiers; it smelled of everything
+that is fetid and rancid and unsavory and unwholesome.
+
+And yet, forty-eight hours before, this town, if it was like every other
+Belgian town, must have been as clean as clean could be.  When the
+Belgian peasant housewife has cleaned the inside of her house she issues
+forth with bucket and scrubbing brush and washes the outside of it--and
+even the pavement in front and the cobbles of the road. But the war had
+come to La Buissière and turned it upside down.
+
+A war wastes towns, it seems, even more visibly than it wastes nations.
+Already the streets were ankle-deep in filth.  There were broken lamps
+and broken bottles and broken windowpanes everywhere, and one could not
+step without an accompaniment of crunching glass from underfoot.
+
+Sacks of provender, which the French had abandoned, were split open and
+their contents wasted in the mire while the inhabitants went hungry.
+The lower floors of the houses were bedded in straw where the soldiers
+had slept, and the straw was thickly covered with dried mud and already
+gave off a sour-sickish odor.  Over everything was the lime dust from
+the powdered walls and plastering.
+
+We drove away, then, over the hill toward the south.  From the crest of
+the bluff we could look down on ruined La Buissière, with its garrison
+of victorious invaders, its frightened townspeople, and its houses full
+of maimed and crippled soldiers of both sides.
+
+Beyond we could see the fields, where the crops, already overripe, must
+surely waste for lack of men and teams to harvest them; and on the edge
+of one field we marked where the three peasants dug the grave for the
+rotting horse, striving to get it underground before it set up a plague.
+
+Except for them, busy with pick and spade, no living creature in sight
+was at work.
+
+Sherman said it!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 4
+
+"Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter!"
+
+
+Have you ever seen three hundred thousand men and one hundred thousand
+horses moving in one compact, marvelous unit of organization, discipline
+and system? If you have not seen it you cannot imagine what it is like.
+If you have seen it you cannot tell what it is like.  In one case the
+conceptive faculty fails you; in the other the descriptive.  I, who have
+seen this sight, am not foolish enough to undertake to put it down with
+pencil on paper.  I think I know something of the limitations of the
+written English language. What I do mean to try to do in this chapter is
+to record some of my impressions as I watched it.
+
+In beginning this job I find myself casting about for comparisons to set
+up against the vision of a full German army of seven army corps on the
+march.  I think of the tales I have read and the stories I have heard of
+other great armies: Alaric's war bands and Attila's; the First Crusade;
+Hannibal's cohorts, and Alexander's host, and Caesar's legions; the
+Goths and the Vandals; the million of Xerxes--if it was a million--and
+Napoleon starting for Moscow.
+
+It is of no use.  This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across
+Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made,
+man-managed thing.  It seems more like a great, orderly function of
+Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a
+mighty wind.  It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of
+thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly is it welded into a whole.  It
+is harder still to accept it as a mutable and a mortal organism, subject
+to the shifts of chance and mischance.
+
+And then, on top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of
+three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one
+single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war
+strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater
+army and hardly know it was there--why, then, the brain refuses to
+wrestle with a computation so gigantic.  The imagination just naturally
+bogs down and quits.
+
+I have already set forth in some detail how it came to pass that we went
+forth from Brussels in a taxicab looking for the war; and how in the
+outskirts of Louvain we found it, and very shortly thereafter also found
+that we were cut off from our return and incidentally had lost not only
+our chauffeur and our taxi-cab but our overcoats as well. There being
+nothing else to do we made ourselves comfortable along side the Belgian
+Lion Cafe in the southern edge of Louvain, and for hours we watched the
+advance guard sliding down the road through a fog of white dust.
+
+Each time a break came in the weaving gray lines we fancied this surely
+was all.  All? What we saw there was a puny dribbling stream compared
+with the torrent that was coming.  The crest of that living tidal wave
+was still two days and many miles to the rearward.  We had seen the head
+and a little of the neck.  The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray
+centipede was as yet far behind.
+
+As we sat in chairs tilted against the wall and watched, we witnessed an
+interesting little side play.  At the first coming of the German
+skirmishers the people of this quarter of the town had seemed stupefied
+with amazement and astonishment.  Most of them, it subsequently
+developed, had believed right up to the last minute that the forts of
+Liege still held out and that the Germans had not yet passed the
+gateways of their country, many kilometers to the eastward.  When the
+scouts of the enemy appeared in their streets they fell for the moment
+into a stunned state.  A little later the appearance of a troop of
+Uhlans had revived their resentment.  We had heard that quick hiss and
+snarl of hatred which sprang from them as the lancers trotted into view
+on their superb mounts out of the mouth of a neighboring lane, and had
+seen how instantaneously the dull, malignant gleam of gun metal, as a
+sergeant pulled his pistol on them, had brought the silence of
+frightened respect again.
+
+It now appeared that realization of the number of the invaders was
+breeding in the Belgians a placating spirit.  If a soldier fell out of
+line at the door of a house to ask for water, all within that house
+strove to bring the water to him.  If an officer, returning from a small
+sortie into other streets, checked up to ask the way to rejoin his
+command, a dozen eager arms waved in chorus to point out the proper
+direction, and a babble of solicitous voices arose from the group about
+his halted horse.
+
+Young Belgian girls began smiling at soldiers swinging by and the
+soldiers grinned back and waved their arms.  You might almost have
+thought the troops were Allies passing through a friendly community.
+This phase of the plastic Flemish temperament made us marvel.  When I
+was told, a fortnight afterward, how these same people rose in the night
+to strike at these their enemies, and how, so doing, they brought about
+the ruination of their city and the summary executions of some hundreds
+of themselves, I marveled all the more.
+
+Presently, as we sat there, we heard--above the rumbling of cannon
+wheels, the nimble clunking of hurrying hoofs and the heavy thudding of
+booted feet, falling and rising all in unison--a new note from overhead,
+a combination of whir and flutter and whine.  We looked aloft.  Directly
+above the troops, flying as straight for Brussels as a homing bee for
+the hive, went a military monoplane, serving as courier and spy for the
+crawling columns below it.  Directly, having gone far ahead, it came
+speeding back, along a lower air lane and performed a series of circling
+and darting gyrations, which doubtlessly had a signal-code meaning for
+the troops.  Twice or three times it swung directly above our heads, and
+at the height at which it now evoluted we could plainly distinguish the
+downward curve of its wing-planes and the peculiar droop of the rudder
+--both things that marked it for an army model.  We could also make out
+the black cross painted on its belly as a further distinguishing mark.
+
+To me a monoplane always suggests a bird when it does not suggest an
+insect or a winged reptile; and this monoplane particularly suggested
+the bird type.  The simile which occurred to me was that of the bird
+which guards the African rhinoceros; after that it was doubly easy to
+conceive of this army as a rhinoceros, having all the brute strength and
+brute force which are a part of that creature, and its well-armored
+sides and massive legs and deadly horned head; and finally its peculiar
+fancy for charging straight at its objective target, trampling down all
+obstacles in the way.
+
+The Germans also fancy their monoplane as a bird; but they call it
+Taube--a dove.  To think of calling this sinister adjunct of warfare a
+dove, which among modern peoples has always symbolized peace, seemed a
+most terrible bit of sarcasm.  As an exquisite essence of irony I saw
+but one thing during our week-end in Louvain to match it, and that was a
+big van requisitioned from a Cologne florist's shop to use in a baggage
+train. It bore on its sides advertisements of potted plants and floral
+pieces--and it was loaded to its top with spare ammunition.
+
+Yet, on second thought, I do not believe the Prussians call their war
+monoplane a dove by way of satire.  The Prussians are a serious-minded
+race and never more serious than when they make war, as all the world
+now knows.
+
+Three monoplanes buzzed over us, making sawmill sounds, during the next
+hour or two. Thereafter, whenever we saw German troops on the march
+through a country new to them we looked aloft for the thing with the
+droopy wings and the black cross on its yellow abdomen.  Sooner or later
+it appeared, coming always out of nowhere and vanishing always into
+space.  We were never disappointed.  It is only the man who expects the
+German army to forget something needful or necessary who is
+disappointed.
+
+It was late in the afternoon when we bade farewell to the three-hundred-
+pound proprietress of the Belgian Lion and sought to reach the center of
+the town through byways not yet blocked off by the marching regiments.
+When we were perhaps halfway to our destination we met a town bellman
+and a town crier, the latter being in the uniform of a Garde Civique.
+The bellringer would ply his clapper until he drew a crowd, and then the
+Garde Civique would halt in an open space at the junction of two or more
+streets and read a proclamation from the burgomaster calling on all the
+inhabitants to preserve their tranquillity and refrain from overt acts
+against the Germans, under promise of safety if they obeyed and threat
+of death at the hands of the Germans if they disregarded the warning.
+
+This word-of-mouth method of spreading an order applied only to the
+outlying sections. In the more thickly settled districts, where
+presumably the populace could read and write, proclamations posted on
+wall and window took its place.  During the three days we stayed in
+Louvain one proclamation succeeded another with almost the frequency of
+special extras of evening newspapers when a big news story breaks in an
+American city: The citizens were to surrender all firearms in their
+possession; it would be immediately fatal to him if a man were caught
+with a lethal weapon on his person or in his house. Tradespeople might
+charge this or that price for the necessities of life, and no more.  All
+persons, except physicians and nurses in the discharge of their
+professional duties, and gendarmes--the latter being now disarmed and
+entirely subservient to the military authorities--must be off the
+streets and public squares at a given time--to wit, nine p. m.  Cafés
+must close at the same hour.  Any soldier who refused to pay for any
+private purchase should be immediately reported at headquarters for
+punishment.  Upper front windows of all houses on certain specified
+streets must be closed and locked after nightfall, remaining so until
+daylight of the following morning; this notice being followed and
+overlapped very shortly by one more amplifying, which prescribed that
+not only must front windows be made fast, but all must have lights
+behind them and the street doors must be left unlocked.
+
+The portent of this was simple enough: If any man sought to fire on the
+soldiers below he must first unfasten a window and expose himself in the
+light; and after he fired admittance would be made easy for those who
+came searching for him to kill him.
+
+At first these placards were signed by the burgomaster, with the
+military commandant's indorsement, and sometimes by both those
+functionaries; but on the second day there appeared one signed by the
+commandant only; and this one, for special emphasis, was bounded by wide
+borders printed in bright red.  It stated, with cruel brevity, that the
+burgomaster, the senator for the district and the leading magistrate had
+been taken into custody as hostages for the good conduct of their
+constituents; and that if a civilian made any attack against the Germans
+he would forfeit his own life and endanger the lives of the three
+prisoners.  Thus, inch by inch, the conquerors, sensing a growing spirit
+of revolt among the conquered--a spirit as yet nowise visible on the
+surface--took typically German steps to hold the rebellious people of
+Louvain in hobbles.  It was when we reached the Y-shaped square in the
+middle of things, with the splendid old Gothic town hall rising on one
+side of it and the famous Church of Saint Pierre at the bottom of the
+gore, that we first beheld at close hand the army of the War Lord.
+Alongside the Belgian Lion we had thought it best to keep our distance
+from the troops as they passed obliquely across our line of vision.
+Here we might press as closely as we pleased to the column.  The
+magnificent precision with which the whole machinery moved was
+astounding--I started to say appalling.  Three streets converging into
+the place were glutted with men, extending from curb to curb; and for an
+outlet there was but one somewhat wider street, which twisted its course
+under the gray walls of the church.  Yet somehow the various lines
+melted together and went thumping off out of sight like streams running
+down a funnel and out at the spout.
+
+Never, so far as we could tell, was there any congestion, any hitch, any
+suggestion of confusion.  Frequently there would come from a sideway a
+group of officers on horseback, or a whole string of commandeered
+touring cars bearing monocled, haughty staff officers in the tonneaus,
+with guards riding beside the chauffeurs and small slick trunks strapped
+on behind.  A whistle would sound shrilly then; and magically a gap
+would appear in the formation.  Into this gap the horsemen or the
+imperious automobiles would slip, and away the column would go again
+without having been disturbed or impeded noticeably.  No stage manager
+ever handled his supers better; and here, be it remembered, there were
+uncountable thousands of supers, and for a stage the twisting, medieval
+convolutions of a strange city.  Now for a space of minutes it would be
+infantry that passed, at the swinging lunge of German foot soldiers on a
+forced march.  Now it would be cavalry, with accouterments jingling and
+horses scrouging in the close-packed ranks; else a battery of the
+viperish looking little rapid-fire guns, or a battery of heavier cannon,
+with cloth fittings over their ugly snouts, like muzzled dogs whose bark
+is bad and whose bite is worse.
+
+Then, always in due order, would succeed the field telegraph corps; the
+field post-office corps; the Red Cross corps; the brass band of, say,
+forty pieces; and all the rest of it, to the extent of a thousand and
+one circus parades rolled together.  There were boats for making pontoon
+bridges, mounted side by side on wagons, with the dried mud of the River
+Meuse still on their flat bottoms; there were baggage trains miles in
+length, wherein the supply of regular army wagons was eked out with
+nondescript vehicles--even family carriages and delivery vans gathered
+up hastily, as the signs on their sides betrayed, from the tradespeople
+of a dozen Northern German cities and towns, and now bearing chalk marks
+on them to show in what division they belonged.  And inevitably at the
+tail of each regiment came its cook wagons, with fires kindled and food
+cooking for supper in the big portable ranges, so that when these passed
+the air would be charged with that pungent reek of burning wood which
+makes an American think of a fire engine on its way to answer an alarm.
+
+Once, as a cook perched on a step at the back of his wagon bent forward
+to stir the stew with a spoon almost big enough for a spade, I saw under
+his hiked-up coat-tails that at the back of his gray trousers there were
+four suspender buttons in a row instead of two. The purpose of this was
+plain: when his suspenders chafed him he might, by shifting the straps
+to different buttons, shift the strain on his shoulders.  All German
+soldiers' trousers have this extra garnishment of buttons aft.
+
+Somebody thought of that.  Somebody thought of everything.
+
+We in America are accustomed to think of the Germans as an obese race,
+swinging big paunches in front of them; but in that army the only fat
+men we saw were officers, and not so many of them.  On occasion, some
+colonel, beefy as a brisket and with rolls of fat on the back of his
+close-shaved neck, would be seen bouncing by, balancing his tired
+stomach on his saddle pommel; but, without exception, the men in the
+ranks were trained down and fine drawn.  They bent forward under the
+weight of their knapsacks and blanket rolls; and their middles were
+bulky with cartridge belts, and bulging pockets covered their flanks.
+
+Inside the shapeless uniforms, however, their limbs swung with athletic
+freedom, and even at the fag-end of a hard day's marching, with perhaps
+several hours of marching yet ahead of them, they carried their heavy
+guns as though those guns were toys.  Their fair sunburned faces were
+lined with sweat marks and masked under dust, and doubtless some were
+desperately weary; but I did not see a straggler.  To date I presume I
+have seen upward of a million of these German soldiers on the march, and
+I have yet to see a straggler.
+
+For the most part the rank and file were stamped by their faces and
+their limbs as being of peasant blood or of the petty artisan type; but
+here and there, along with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick
+maker, passed one of a slenderer build, usually spectacled and wearing,
+even in this employment, the unmistakable look of the cultured,
+scholarly man.
+
+And every other man, regardless of his breed, held a cheap cigar between
+his front teeth; but the wagon drivers and many of the cavalrymen smoked
+pipes--the long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe, which the German loves.  The
+column moved beneath a smoke-wreath of its own making.
+
+The thing, however, which struck one most forcibly was the absolute
+completeness, the perfect uniformity, of the whole scheme.  Any man's
+equipment was identically like any other man's equipment.  Every
+drinking cup dangled behind its owner's spine-tip at precisely the same
+angle; every strap and every buckle matched.  These Germans had been run
+through a mold and they had all come out soldiers.  And, barring a few
+general officers, they were all young men--men yet on the sunny side of
+thirty.  Later we were to see plenty of older men--reserves and
+Landwehr--but this was the pick of the western line that passed through
+Louvain, the chosen product of the active wing of the service.
+
+Out of the narrow streets the marchers issued; and as they reached the
+broader space before the town hall each company would raise a song,
+beating with its heavy boots on the paving stones to mark the time.
+Presently we detected a mutter of resentment rising from the troops; and
+seeking the cause of this we discerned that some of them had caught
+sight of a big Belgian flag which whipped in the breeze from the top of
+the Church of Saint Pierre.  However, the flag stayed where it had been
+put during the three days we remained in Louvain.  Seemingly the German
+commander did not greatly care whose flag flew on the church tower
+overhead so long as he held dominion of the earth below and the dwellers
+thereof.
+
+Well, we watched the gray ear-wig wriggling away to the westward until
+we were surfeited, and then we set about finding a place where we might
+rest our dizzy heads. We could not get near the principal hotels.  These
+already were filled with high officers and ringed about with sentries;
+but half a mile away, on the plaza fronting the main railroad station,
+we finally secured accommodations--such as they were--at a small fourth-
+rate hotel.
+
+It called itself by a gorgeous title--it was the House of the Thousand
+Columns, which was as true a saying as though it had been named the
+House of the One Column; for it had neither one column nor a thousand,
+but only a small, dingy beer bar below and some ten dismal living rooms
+above.  Established here, we set about getting in touch with the German
+higher-ups, since we were likely to be mistaken for Englishmen, which
+would be embarrassing certainly, and might even be painful.  At the
+hotel next door--for all the buildings flanking this square were hotels
+of a sort--we found a group of officers.
+
+One of them, a tall, handsome, magnetic chap, with a big, deep laugh and
+a most beautiful command of our own tongue, turned out to be a captain
+on the general staff.  It seemed to him the greatest joke in the world
+that four American correspondents should come looking for war in a
+taxicab, and should find it too.  He beat himself on his flanks in the
+excess of his joy, and called up half a dozen friends to hear the
+amazing tale; and they enjoyed it too.
+
+He said he felt sure his adjutant would appreciate the joke; and, as
+incidentally his adjutant was the person in all the world we wanted most
+just then to see, we went with him to headquarters, which was a mile
+away in the local Palais de Justice--or, as we should say in America,
+the courthouse.  By now it was good and dark; and as no street lamps
+burned we walked through a street that was like a tunnel for blackness.
+
+The roadway was full of infantry still pressing forward to a camping
+place somewhere beyond the town.  We could just make out the shadowy
+shapes of the men, but their feet made a noise like thunderclaps, and
+they sang a German marching song with a splendid lilt and swing to it.
+
+"Just listen!" said the captain proudly.  "They are always like that--
+they march all day and half the night, and never do they grow weary.
+They are in fine spirits--our men. And we can hardly hold them back.
+They will go forward--always forward!
+
+"In this war we have no such command as Retreat! That word we have
+blotted out. Either we shall go forward or we shall die! We do not
+expect to fall back, ever.  The men know this; and if our generals would
+but let them they would run to Paris instead of walking there."
+
+I think it was not altogether through vainglory he spoke.  He was not a
+bombastic sort.  I think he voiced the intent of the army to which he
+belonged.
+
+At the Palais de Justice the adjutant was not to be seen; so our guide
+volunteered to write a note of introduction for us.  Standing in a
+doorway of the building, where a light burned, he opened a small flat
+leather pack that swung from his belt, along with the excellent map of
+Belgium inclosed in a leather frame which every German officer carried.
+We marveled that the pack contained pencils, pens, inkpot, seals,
+officially stamped envelopes and note paper, and blank forms of various
+devices.  Verily these Germans had remembered all things and forgotten
+nothing.  I said that to myself mentally at the moment; nor have I had
+reason since to withdraw or qualify the remark.
+
+The next morning I saw the adjutant, whose name was Renner and whose
+title was that of major; but first I, as spokesman, underwent a search
+for hidden weapons at the hands of a secret service man.  Major Renner
+was most courteous; also he was amused to hear the details of our
+taxicabbing expedition into his lines.  But of the desire which lay
+nearest our hearts---to get back to Brussels in time haply to witness
+its occupation by the Germans--he would not hear.
+
+"For your own sakes," thus he explained it, "I dare not let you
+gentlemen go.  Terrible things have happened.  Last night a colonel of
+infantry was murdered while he was asleep; and I have just heard that
+fifteen of our soldiers had their throats cut, also as they slept.  From
+houses our troops have been fired on, and between here and Brussels
+there has been much of this guerrilla warfare on us.  To those who do
+such things and to those who protect them we show no mercy.  We shoot
+them on the spot and burn their houses to the ground.
+
+"I can well understand that the Belgians resent our coming into their
+country.  We ourselves regret it; but it was a military necessity.  We
+could do nothing else.  If the Belgians put on uniforms and enroll as
+soldiers and fight us openly, we shall capture them if we can; we shall
+kill them if we must; but in all cases we shall treat them as honorable
+enemies, fighting under the rules of civilized warfare.
+
+"But this shooting from ambush by civilians; this murdering of our
+people in the night--that we cannot endure.  We have made a rule that if
+shots are fired by a civilian from a house then we shall burn that
+house; and we shall kill that man and all the other men in that house
+whom we suspect of harboring him or aiding him.
+
+"We make no attempt to disguise our methods of reprisal.  We are willing
+for the world to know it; and it is not because I wish to cover up or
+hide any of our actions from your eyes, and from the eyes of the
+American people, that I am refusing you passes for your return to
+Brussels to-day.  But, you see, our men have been terribly excited by
+these crimes of the Belgian populace, and in their excitement they might
+make serious mistakes.
+
+"Our troops are under splendid discipline, as you may have seen already
+for yourselves. And I assure you the Germans are not a bloodthirsty or a
+drunken or a barbarous people; but in every army there are fools and,
+what is worse, in every army there are brutes.  You are strangers; and
+if you passed along the road to-day some of our more ignorant men,
+seeing that you were not natives and suspecting your motives, might harm
+you.  There might be some stupid, angry common soldier, some over-
+zealous under officer--you understand me, do you not, gentlemen?
+
+"So you will please remain here quietly, having nothing to do with any
+of our men who may seek to talk with you.  That last is important; for I
+may tell you that our secret-service people have already reported your
+presence, and they naturally are anxious to make a showing.
+
+"At the end of one day--perhaps two--we shall be able, I think, to give
+you safe conduct back to Brussels.  And then I hope you will be able to
+speak a good word to the American public for our army."
+
+After this fashion of speaking I heard now from the lips of Major Renner
+what I subsequently heard fifty times from other army men, and likewise
+from high German civilians, of the common German attitude toward
+Belgium.  Often these others have used almost the same words he used.
+Invariably they have sought to convey the same meaning.
+
+For those three days we stayed on unwillingly in Louvain we were not
+once out of sight of German soldiers, nor by day or night out of sound
+of their threshing feet and their rumbling wheels.  We never looked;
+this way or that but we saw their gray masses blocking up the distances.
+We never entered shop or house but we found Germans already there.  We
+never sought to turn off the main-traveled streets into a byway but our
+path was barred by a guard seeking to know our business.  And always, as
+we noted, for this duty those in command had chosen soldiers who knew a
+smattering of French, in order that the sentries might be able to speak
+with the citizens.  If we passed along a sidewalk the chances were that
+it would be lined thick with soldiers lying against the walls resting,
+or sitting on the curbs, with their shoes off, easing their feet.  If we
+looked into the sky our prospects for seeing a monoplane flying about
+were most excellent.  If we entered a square it was bound to be jammed
+with horses and packed baggage trains and supply wagons.  The atmosphere
+was laden with the ropy scents of the boiling stews and with the heavier
+smells of the soldiers' unwashed bodies and their sweating horses.
+
+Finally, to their credit be it said, we personally did not see one
+German, whether officer or private, who mistreated any citizen, or was
+offensively rude to any citizen, or who refused to pay a fair reckoning
+for what he bought, or who was conspicuously drunk. The postcard venders
+of Louvain must have grown fat with wealth; for, next to bottled beer
+and butter and cheap cigars, every common soldier craved postcards above
+all other commodities.
+
+We grew tired after a while of seeing Germans; it seemed to us that
+every vista always had been choked with unshaved, blond, blocky, short-
+haired men in rawhide boots and ill-fitting gray tunics; and that every
+vista always would be.  It took a new kind of gun, or an automobile with
+a steel prow for charging through barbed-wire entanglements, or a group
+of bedraggled Belgian prisoners slouching by under convoy, to make us
+give the spectacle more than a passing glance.
+
+There was something hypnotic, something tremendously wearisome to the
+mind in those thick lines flowing sluggishly along in streams like
+molten lead; in the hedges of gun barrels all slanting at the same
+angle; in the same types of faces repeated and repeated countlessly; in
+the legs which scissored by in such faultless unison and at each clip of
+each pair of living shears cut off just so much of the road--never any
+more and never any less, but always just exactly so much.
+
+Our jaded and satiated fancies had been fed on soldiers and all the
+cumbersome pageantry of war until they refused to be quickened by what,
+half a week before, would have set every nerve tingling.  Almost the
+only thing that stands out distinct in my memory from the confused
+recollections of the last morning spent in Louvain is a huge sight-
+seeing car--of the sort known at home as a rubberneck wagon--which
+lumbered by us with Red Cross men perched like roosting gray birds on
+all its seats.  We estimated we saw two hundred thousand men in motion
+through the ancient town.  We learned afterward we had under-figured the
+total by at least a third.
+
+During these days the life of Louvain went on, so far as our alien eyes
+could judge, pretty much as it probably did in the peace times
+preceding.  At night, obeying an order, the people stayed within their
+doors; in the daylight hours they pursued their customary business, not
+greatly incommoded apparently by the presence of the conqueror.  If
+there was simmering hate in the hearts of the men and women of Louvain
+it did not betray itself in their sobered faces.  I saw a soldier,
+somewhat fuddled, seize a serving maid about the waist and kiss her; he
+received a slap in the face and fell back in bad order, while his mates
+cheered the spunky girl.  A minute later she emerged from the house to
+which she had retreated, seemingly ready to swap slaps for kisses some
+more.
+
+However, from time to time sinister suggestions did obtrude themselves
+on us.  For example, on the second morning of our enforced stay at the
+House of the Thousand Columns we watched a double file of soldiers going
+through a street toward the Palais de Justice.  Two roughly clad natives
+walked between the lines of bared bayonets.  One was an old man who
+walked proudly with his head erect.  He was like a man going to a feast.
+The other was bent almost double, and his hands were tied behind his
+back.
+
+A few minutes afterward a barred yellow van, under escort, came through
+the square fronting the railroad station and disappeared behind a mass
+of low buildings.  From that direction we presently heard shots.  Soon
+the van came back, unescorted this time; and behind it came Belgians
+with Red Cross arm badges, bearing on their shoulders two litters on
+which were still figures covered with blankets, so that only the
+stockinged feet showed.
+
+Twice thereafter this play was repeated, with slight variations, and
+each time we Americans, looking on from our front windows, drew our own
+conclusions.  Also, from the same vantage point we saw an automobile
+pass bearing a couple of German officers and a little, scared-looking
+man in a frock coat and a high hat, whose black mustache stood out like
+a charcoal mark against the very white background of his face.  This
+little man, we learned, was the burgomaster, and this day he was being
+held a prisoner and responsible for the good conduct of some fifty-odd
+thousand of his fellow citizens.  That night our host, a gross, silent
+man in carpet slippers, told us the burgomaster was ill in bed at home.
+
+"He suffers," explained our landlord in French, "from a crisis of the
+nerves." The French language is an expressive language.
+
+Then, coming a pace nearer, our landlord added a question in a cautious
+whisper.
+
+"Messieurs," he asked, "do you think it can be true, as my neighbors
+tell me, that the United States President has ordered the Germans to get
+out of our country?"
+
+We shook our heads, and he went silently away in his carpet slippers;
+and his broad Flemish face gave no hint of what corrosive thoughts he
+may have had in his heart.
+
+It was Wednesday morning when we entered Louvain.  It was Saturday
+morning when we left it.  This last undertaking was preceded by
+difficulties.  As a preliminary to it we visited in turn all the stables
+in Louvain where ordinarily horses and wheeled vehicles could be had for
+hire.
+
+Perhaps there were no horses left in the stalls--thanks to either
+Belgian foragers or to German--or, if there were horses, no driver would
+risk his hide on the open road among the German pack trains and rear
+guards.  At length we did find a tall, red-haired Walloon who said he
+would go anywhere on earth, and provide a team for the going, if we paid
+the price he asked.  We paid it in advance, in case anything should
+happen on the way, and he took us in a venerable open carriage behind
+two crow-bait skeletons that had once, in a happier day when hay was
+cheaper, been horses.
+
+We drove slowly, taking the middle of the wide Brussels road.  On our
+right, traveling in the same direction, crawled an unending line of
+German baggage wagons and pontoon trucks.  On our left, going the
+opposite way, was another line, also unending, made up of refugee
+villagers, returning afoot to the towns beyond Louvain from which they
+had fled four days earlier.  They were footsore and they limped; they
+were of all ages and most miserable-looking.  And, one and all, they
+were as tongueless as so many ghosts.  Thus we traveled; and at the end
+of the first hour came to the tiny town of Leefdael.
+
+At Leefdael there must have been fighting, for some of the houses were
+gutted by shells.  At least two had been burned; and a big tin sign at a
+railroad crossing had become a tin colander where flying lead had sieved
+it.  In a beet patch beside one of the houses was a mound of fresh earth
+the length of a long man, with a cross of sticks at the head of it.  A
+Belgian soldier's cap was perched on the upright and a scrap of paper
+was made fast to the cross arm; and two peasants stood there apparently
+reading what was written on the paper.  Later such sights as these were
+to become almost the commonest incidents of our countryside
+campaignings; but now we looked with all our eyes.
+
+Except that the roadside ditches were littered with beer bottles and
+scraps of paper, and the road itself rutted by cannon wheels, we saw
+little enough after leaving Leefdael to suggest that an army had come
+this way until we were in the outskirts of Brussels.  In a tree-edged,
+grass-plotted boulevard at the edge of the Bois, toward Tervueren,
+cavalry had halted.  The turf was scarred with hoofprints and strewed
+with hay; and there was a row of small trenches in which the Germans had
+built their fires to do their cooking.  The sod, which had been removed
+to make these trenches, was piled in neat little terraces, ready to be
+put back; and care plainly had been taken by the troopers to avoid
+damaging the bark on the trunks of the ash and elm trees.
+
+There it was--the German system of warfare! These Germans might carry on
+their war after the most scientifically deadly plan the world has ever
+known; they might deal out their peculiarly fatal brand of drumhead
+justice to all civilians who crossed their paths bearing arms; they
+might burn and waste for punishment; they might lay on a captured city
+and a whipped province a tribute of foodstuffs and an indemnity of money
+heavier than any civilized race has ever demanded of the cowed and
+conquered--might do all these things and more besides--but their common
+troopers saved the sods of the greensward for replanting and spared the
+boles of the young shade trees! Next day we again left Brussels, the
+submissive, and made a much longer excursion under German auspices.
+And, at length, after much travail, we landed in the German frontier
+city of Aix-la-Chapelle, where I wrote these lines.  There it was, two
+days after our arrival, that we heard of the fate of Louvain and of that
+pale little man, the burgomaster, who had survived his crisis of the
+nerves to die of a German bullet.
+
+We wondered what became of the proprietor of the House of the Thousand
+Columns; and of the young Dutch tutor in the Berlitz School of
+Languages, who had served us as a guide and interpreter; and of the
+pretty, gentle little Flemish woman who brought us our meals in her
+clean, small restaurant round the corner from the Hotel de Ville; and of
+the kindly, red-bearded priest at the Church of Saint Jacques, who gave
+us ripe pears and old wine.
+
+I reckon we shall always wonder what became of them, and that we shall
+never know.  I hoped mightily that the American wing of the big Catholic
+seminary had been spared.  It had a stone figure of an American Indian--
+looking something like Sitting Bull, we thought--over its doors; and
+that was the only typically American thing we saw in all Louvain.
+
+When next I saw Louvain the University was gone and the stone Indian was
+gone too.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+Being a Guest of the Kaiser
+
+
+You know how four of us blundered into the German lines in a taxicab;
+and how, getting out of German hands after three days and back to
+Brussels, we undertook, in less than twenty-four hours thereafter, to
+trail the main forces then shoving steadily southward with no other goal
+before them but Paris.
+
+First by hired hack, as we used to say when writing accounts of funerals
+down in Paducah, then afoot through the dust, and finally, with an
+equipment consisting of that butcher's superannuated dogcart, that
+elderly mare emeritus and those two bicycles, we made our zigzagging way
+downward through Belgium.
+
+We knew that our credentials were, for German purposes, of most dubious
+and uncertain value.  We knew that the Germans were permitting no
+correspondents--not even German correspondents--to accompany them.  We
+knew that any alien caught in the German front was liable to death on
+the spot, without investigation of his motives. We knew all these
+things; and the knowledge of them gave a fellow tingling sensations in
+the tips of his toes when he permitted himself to think about his
+situation.  But, after the first few hours, we took heart unto
+ourselves; for everywhere we met only kindness and courtesy at the hands
+of the Kaiser's soldiers, men and officers alike.
+
+There was, it is true, the single small instance of the excited noncom.
+who poked a large, unwholesome-looking automatic pistol into my
+shrinking diaphragm when he wanted me to get off the running board of a
+military automobile into which I had climbed, half a minute before, by
+invitation of the private who steered it.  I gathered his meaning right
+away, even though he uttered only guttural German and that at the top of
+his voice; a pointed revolver speaks with a tongue which is understood
+by all peoples.  Besides, he had the distinct advantage in repartee; and
+so, with no extended argument, I got down from there and he pouched his
+ironmongery.  I regarded the incident as being closed and was perfectly
+willing that it should remain closed.
+
+That, however, though of consuming interest to me at the moment, was but
+a detail--an exception to prove the standing rule.  One place we dined
+with a Rittmeister's mess; and while we sat, eating of their midday
+ration of thick pea soup with sliced sausages in it, some of the younger
+officers stood; also they let us stretch our wearied legs on their
+mattresses, which were ranged seven in a row on the parlor floor of a
+Belgian house, where from a corner a plaster statue of Joan of Arc gazed
+at us with her plaster eyes.
+
+Common soldiers offered repeatedly to share their rye-bread sandwiches
+and bottled beer with us.  Not once, but a dozen times, officers of
+various rank let us look at their maps and use their field glasses; and
+they gave us advice for reaching the zone of actual fighting and swapped
+gossip with us, and frequently regretted that they had no spare mounts
+or spare automobiles to loan us.
+
+We attributed a good deal of this to the inherent kindliness of the
+German gentleman's nature; but more of it we attributed to a newborn
+desire on the part of these men to have disinterested journalists see
+with their own eyes the scope and result of the German operations, in
+the hope that the truth regarding alleged German atrocities might reach
+the outside world and particularly might reach America.
+
+Of the waste and wreckage of war; of desolated homes and shattered
+villages; of the ruthless, relentless, punitive exactness with which the
+Germans punished not only those civilians they accused of firing on them
+but those they suspected of giving harbor or aid to the offenders; of
+widows and orphans; of families of innocent sufferers, without a roof to
+shelter them or a bite to stay them; of fair lands plowed by cannon
+balls, and harrowed with rifle bullets, and sown with dead men's bones;
+of men horribly maimed and mangled by lead and steel; of long mud
+trenches where the killed lay thick under the fresh clods--of all this
+and more I saw enough to cure any man of the delusion that war is a
+beautiful, glorious, inspiring thing, and to make him know it for what
+it is--altogether hideous and unutterably awful.
+
+As for Uhlans spearing babies on their lances, and officers sabering
+their own men, and soldiers murdering and mutilating and torturing at
+will--I saw nothing.  I knew of these tales only from having read them
+in the dispatches sent from the Continent to England, and from there
+cabled to American papers.
+
+Even so, I hold no brief for the Germans; or for the reasons that
+inspired them in waging this war; or for the fashion after which they
+have waged it.  I am only trying to tell what I saw with my own eyes and
+heard with my own ears.
+
+Be all that as it may, we straggled into Beaumont--five of us--on the
+evening of the third day out from Brussels, without baggage or
+equipment, barring only what we wore on our several tired and drooping
+backs.  As in the case of our other trip, a simple sight-seeing ride had
+resolved itself into an expeditionary campaign; and so there we were,
+bearing, as proof of our good faith and professional intentions, only
+our American passports, our passes issued by General von Jarotzky, at
+Brussels, and--most potent of all for winning confidence from the casual
+eye--a little frayed silk American flag, with a hole burned in it by a
+careless cigar butt, which was knotted to the front rail of our creaking
+dogcart.
+
+Immediately after passing the ruined and deserted village of Montignies
+St. Christophe, we came at dusk to a place where a company of German
+infantrymen were in camp about a big graystone farmhouse.  They were
+cooking supper over big trench fires and, as usual, they were singing.
+The light shone up into the faces of the cooks, bringing out in ruddy
+relief their florid skins and yellow beards.  A yearling bull calf was
+tied to a supply-wagon wheel, bellowing his indignation.  I imagine he
+quit bellowing shortly thereafter.
+
+An officer came to the edge of the road and, peering sharply at us over
+a broken hedge, made as if to stop us; then changed his mind and
+permitted us to go unchallenged. Entering the town, we proceeded,
+winding our way among pack trains and stalled motor trucks, to the town
+square.  Our little cavalcade halted to the accompaniment of good-
+natured titterings from many officers in front of the town house of the
+Prince de Caraman-Chimay.
+
+By a few Americans the prince is remembered as having been the cousin of
+one of the husbands of the much-married Clara Ward, of Detroit; but at
+this moment, though absent, he had particularly endeared himself to the
+Germans through the circumstance of his having left behind, in his wine
+cellars, twenty thousand bottles of rare vintages. Wine, I believe, is
+contraband of war.  Certainly in this instance it was.  As we speedily
+discovered, it was a very unlucky common soldier who did not have a swig
+of rare Burgundy or ancient claret to wash down his black bread and
+sausage that night at supper.
+
+Unwittingly we had bumped into the headquarters of the whole army--not
+of a single corps, but of an army.  In the thickening twilight on the
+little square gorgeous staff officers came and went, afoot, on horseback
+and in automobiles; and through an open window we caught a glimpse of a
+splendid-looking general, sitting booted and sword-belted at a table in
+the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's library, with hunting trophies--skin and
+horn and claw--looking down at him from the high-paneled oak
+wainscotings, and spick-and-span aides waiting to take his orders and
+discharge his commissions.
+
+It dawned on us that, having accidentally slipped through a hole in the
+German rear guard, we had reached a point close to the front of
+operations.  We felt uncomfortable.
+
+It was not at all likely that a Herr Over-Commander would expedite us
+with the graciousness that had marked his underlings back along the line
+of communication.  We remarked as much to one another; and it was a true
+prophecy.  A staff officer--a colonel who spoke good English--received
+us at the door of the villa and examined our papers in the light which
+streamed over his shoulder from a fine big hallway behind him. In
+everything, both then and thereafter, he was most polite.
+
+"I do not understand how you came here, you gentlemen," he said at
+length.  "We have no correspondents with our army."
+
+"You have now," said one of us, seeking to brighten the growing
+embarrassment of the situation with a small jape.
+
+Perhaps he did not understand.  Perhaps it was against the regulations
+for a colonel, in full caparison of sword and shoulder straps, to laugh
+at a joke from a dusty, wayworn, shabby stranger in a dented straw hat
+and a wrinkled Yankee-made coat.  At any rate this colonel did not
+laugh.
+
+"You did quite right to report yourselves here and explain your
+purposes," he continued gravely; "but it is impossible that you may
+proceed.  To-morrow morning we shall give you escort and transportation
+back to Brussels.  I anticipate"--here he glanced quizzically at our
+aged mare, drooping knee-sprung between the shafts of the lopsided
+dogcart--"I anticipate that you will return more speedily than you
+arrived.
+
+"You will kindly report to me here in the morning at eleven.  Meantime
+remember, gentlemen, that you are not prisoners--by no means, not.  You
+may consider yourselves for the time being as--shall we say?--guests of
+the German Army, temporarily detained.  You are at perfect liberty to
+come and go--only I should advise you not to go too far, because if you
+should try to leave town tonight our soldiers would certainly shoot you
+quite dead.  It is not agreeable to be shot; and, besides, your great
+Government might object.  So, then, I shall have the pleasure of seeing
+you in the morning, shall I not? Yes? Good night, gentlemen!"
+
+He clicked his neat heels so that his spurs jangled, and bowed us out
+into the dark.  The question of securing lodgings loomed large and
+imminent before us.  Officers filled the few small inns and hotels;
+soldiers, as we could see, were quartered thickly in all the houses in
+sight; and already the inhabitants were locking their doors and dousing
+their lights in accordance with an order from a source that was not to
+be disobeyed.  Nine out of ten houses about the square were now but
+black oblongs rising against the gray sky. We had nowhere to go; and yet
+if we did not go somewhere, and that pretty soon, the patrols would
+undoubtedly take unpleasant cognizance of our presence.  Besides, the
+searching chill of a Belgian night was making us stiff.
+
+Scouting up a narrow winding alley, one of the party who spoke German
+found a courtyard behind a schoolhouse called imposingly L'Ecole Moyenne
+de Beaumont, where he obtained permission from a German sergeant to
+stable our mare for the night in the aristocratic companionship of a
+troop of officers' horses.  Through another streak of luck we preempted
+a room in the schoolhouse and held it against all comers by right of
+squatter sovereignty.  There my friends and I slept on the stone floor,
+with a scanty amount of hay under us for a bed and our coats for
+coverlets.  But before we slept we dined.
+
+We dined on hard-boiled eggs and stale cheese--which we had saved from
+midday--in a big, bare study hall half full of lancers.  They gave us
+rye bread and some of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's wine to go with the
+provender we had brought, and they made room for us at the long benches
+that ran lengthwise of the room.  Afterward one of them--a master
+musician, for all his soiled gray uniform and grimed fingers--played a
+piano that was in the corner, while all the rest sang.
+
+It was a strange picture they made there.  On the wall, on a row of
+hooks, still hung the small umbrellas and book-satchels of the pupils.
+Presumably at the coming of the Germans they had run home in such a
+panic that they left their school-traps behind. There were sums in
+chalk, half erased, on the blackboard; and one of the troopers took a
+scrap of chalk and wrote "On to Paris!" in big letters here and there.
+A sleepy parrot, looking like a bundle of rumpled green feathers,
+squatted on its perch in a cage behind the master's desk, occasionally
+emitting a loud squawk as though protesting against this intrusion on
+its privacy.
+
+When their wine had warmed them our soldier-hosts sang and sang,
+unendingly.  They had been on the march all day, and next day would
+probably march half the day and fight the other half, for the French and
+English were just ahead; but now they sprawled over the school benches
+and drummed on the boards with their fists and feet, and sang at the
+tops of their voices.  They sang their favorite marching songs--Die
+Wacht am Rhein, of course; and Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles!
+which has a fine, sonorous cathedral swing to it; and God Save the
+King!--with different words to the air, be it said; and Haltet Aus!
+Also, for variety, they sang Tannenbaum--with the same tune as Maryland,
+My Maryland!--and Heil dir im Sieges-kranz; and snatches from various
+operas.
+
+When one of us asked for Heine's Lorelei they sang not one verse of it,
+or two, but twenty or more; and then, by way of compliment to the guests
+of the evening, they reared upon their feet and gave us The Star
+Spangled Banner, to German words. Suddenly two of them began dancing.
+In their big rawhide boots, with hobbed soles and steel-shod heels, they
+pounded back and forth, while the others whooped them on.  One of the
+dancers gave out presently; but the other seemed still unimpaired in
+wind and limb.  He darted into an adjoining room and came back in a
+minute dragging a half-frightened, half-pleased little Belgian scullery
+maid and whirled her about to waltz music until she dropped for want of
+breath to carry her another turn; after which he did a solo--Teutonic
+version--of a darky breakdown, stopping only to join in the next song.
+
+It was eleven o'clock and they were still singing when we left them and
+went groping through dark hallways to where our simple hay mattress
+awaited us.  I might add that we were indebted to a corporal of lancers
+for the hay, which he pilfered from the feed racks outside after
+somebody had stolen the two bundles of straw one of us had previously
+purchased.  Except for his charity of heart we should have lain on the
+cold flagging.
+
+The next morning was Thursday morning, and by Thursday night, at the
+very latest, we counted on being back in Brussels; but we were not
+destined to see Brussels again for nearly six weeks.  We breakfasted
+frugally on good bread and execrable coffee at a half-wrecked little
+café where soldiers had slept; and at eleven o'clock, when we had
+bestowed Bulotte, the ancient nag, and the dogcart on an accommodating
+youth--giving them to him as a gracious gift, since neither he nor
+anyone else would buy the outfit at any price--we repaired to the villa
+to report ourselves and start on our return to the place whence we had
+come so laboriously.
+
+The commander and his staff were just leaving, and they were in a big
+hurry.  We knew the reason for their hurry, for since daylight the sound
+of heavy firing to the south and southwest, across the border in the
+neighborhood of Maubeuge, had been plainly audible.  Officers in long
+gray overcoats with facings of blue, green, black, yellow and four
+shades of red--depending on the branches of the service to which they
+belonged--were piling into automobiles and scooting away.
+
+As we sat on a wooden bench before the prince's villa, waiting for
+further instructions from our friend of the night before--meaning by
+that the colonel who could not take a joke, but could make one of his
+own--a tall, slender young man of about twenty-four, with a little silky
+mustache and a long, vulpine nose, came striding across the square with
+long steps.  As nearly as we could tell, he wore a colonel's shoulder
+straps; and, aside from the fact that he seemed exceedingly youthful to
+be a colonel, we were astonished at the deference that was paid him by
+those of higher rank, who stood about waiting for their cars.  Generals,
+and the like, even grizzled old generals with breasts full of
+decorations, bowed and clicked before him; and when he, smiling broadly,
+insisted on shaking hands with all of them, some of the group seemed
+overcome with gratification.
+
+Presently a sort of family resemblance in his face to some one whose
+picture we had seen often somewhere began to impress itself on us, and
+we wondered who he was; but, being rather out of the setting ourselves,
+none of us cared to ask.  Two weeks later, in Aix-la-Chapelle, I was
+passing a shop and saw his likeness in full uniform on a souvenir
+postcard in the window.  It was Prince August Wilhelm, fourth son of the
+Kaiser; and we had seen him as he was about getting his first taste of
+being under fire by the enemy.
+
+Pretty soon he was gone and our colonel was gone, and nearly everybody
+else was gone too; Companies of infantry and cavalry fell in and moved
+off, and a belated battery of field artillery rumbled out of sight up
+the twisting main street.  The field postoffice staff, the field
+telegraph staff, the Red Cross corps and the wagon trains followed in
+due turn, leaving behind only a small squad to hold the town--and us.
+
+A tall young lieutenant was in charge of the handful who remained; and,
+by the same token, as was to transpire, he was also in charge of us.  He
+was built for a football player, and he had shoulders like a Cyclops,
+and his family name was Mittendorfer.  He never spoke to his men except
+to roar at them like a raging lion, and he never addressed us except to
+coo as softly as the mourning dove.  It was interesting to listen as his
+voice changed from a bellow to a croon, and back again a moment later to
+a bellow.  With training he might have made an opera singer--he had such
+a vocal range and such perfect control over it.  This Lieutenant
+Mittendorfer introduced himself to our attention by coming smartly up
+and saying there had been a delay about requisitioning an automobile for
+our use; but he thought the car would be along very shortly--and would
+the American gentlemen be so good as to wait? There being nothing else
+to do, we decided to do as he suggested.
+
+We chose for our place of waiting a row of seats before a taverne, and
+there we sat, side by side, keeping count of the guns booming in the
+distance, until it began to rain.  A sergeant came up then and invited
+us to go with him, in order that we might escape a wetting.  He waved us
+into the doorway of a house two doors from where we had been sitting, at
+the same time suggesting to us that we throw away our cigars and
+cigarettes. When we crossed the threshold we realized the good intention
+behind this advice, seeing that the room we entered, which had been a
+shop of sorts, was now an improvised powder magazine.
+
+From the floor to the height of a man it was piled with explosive shells
+for field guns, cased in straw covers like wine bottles, and stacked in
+neat rows, with their noses all pointing one way.  Our guide led us
+along an aisle of these deadly things, beckoned us through another
+doorway at the side, where a sentry stood with a bayonet fixed on his
+gun, and with a wave of his hand invited us to partake of the
+hospitalities of the place. We looked about us, and lo! we were hard-
+and-fast in jail!
+
+I have been in pleasanter indoor retreats in my time, even on rainy
+afternoons.  The room was bedded down ankle-deep in straw; and the
+straw, which had probably been fresh the day before, already gave off a
+strong musky odor--the smell of an animal cage in a zoo.
+
+For furnishings, the place contained a bench and a large iron pot
+containing a meat stew, which had now gone cold, so that a rime of gray
+suet coated the upper half of the pot.  But of human occupants there was
+an ample sufficiency, considering the cubic space available for
+breathing purposes.  Sitting in melancholy array against the walls, with
+their legs half buried in the straw and their backs against the
+baseboards, were eighteen prisoners--two Belgian cavalrymen and sixteen
+Frenchmen--mostly Zouaves and chasseurs-a-pied.  Also, there were three
+Turcos from Northern Africa, almost as dark as negroes, wearing red
+fezzes and soiled white, baggy, skirtlike arrangements instead of
+trousers.  They all looked very dirty, very unhappy and very sleepy.
+
+At the far side of the room on a bench was another group of four
+prisoners; and of these we knew two personally--Gerbeaux, a Frenchman
+who lived in Brussels and served as the resident Brussels correspondent
+of a Chicago paper; and Stevens, an American artist, originally from
+Michigan, but who for several years had divided his time between Paris
+and Brussels.  With them were a Belgian photographer, scared now into a
+quivering heap from which two wall-eyes peered out wildly, and a negro
+chauffeur, a soot-black Congo boy who had been brought away from Africa
+on a training ship as a child.  He, apparently, was the least-concerned
+person in that hole.
+
+The night before, by chance, we had heard that Gerbeaux and Stevens were
+under detention, but until this moment of meeting we did not know their
+exact whereabouts. They--the Frenchman, the American and the Belgian--
+had started out from Brussels in an auto driven by the African, on
+Monday, just a day behind us.  Because their car carried a Red Cross
+flag without authority to do so, and because they had a camera with
+them, they very soon found themselves under arrest, and, what was worse,
+under suspicion.  Except that for two days they had been marched afoot
+an average of twenty-five miles a day, they had fared pretty well,
+barring Stevens.  He, being separated from the others, had fallen into
+the hands of an officer who treated him with such severity that the
+account of his experiences makes a tale worth recounting separately and
+at length.
+
+We stayed in that place half an hour--one of the longest half hours I
+remember.  There was a soldier with a fixed bayonet at the door, and
+another soldier with a saw-edged bayonet at the window, which was
+broken.  Parties of soldiers kept coming to this window to peer at the
+exhibits within; and, as they invariably took the civilians for
+Englishmen who had been caught as spies, we attracted almost as much
+attention as the Turcos in their funny ballet skirts; in fact I may say
+we fairly divided the center of the stage with the Turcos.
+
+At the end of half an hour the lieutenant bustled in, all apologies, to
+say there had been a mistake and that we should never have been put in
+with the prisoners at all.  The rain being over, he invited us to come
+outside and get a change of air.  When we got outside we found that our
+two bicycles, which we had left leaning against the curb, were gone. To
+date they are still gone.
+
+Again we sat waiting.  Finally it occurred to us to go inside the little
+taverne, where, perhaps, we should be less conspicuous.  We went in, and
+presently we were followed by Lieutenant Mittendorfer, he bringing with
+him a tall young top-sergeant of infantry who carried his left arm in a
+sling and had a three weeks' growth of fuzzy red beard on his chops.  It
+was explained that this top-sergeant, Rosenthal by name, had been
+especially assigned to be our companion--our playfellow, as it were;--
+until such time as the long-delayed automobile should appear.
+
+Sergeant Rosenthal, who was very proud of his punctured wrist and very
+hopeful of getting a promotion, went out soon; but it speedily became
+evident that he had not forgotten us.  For one soldier with his gun
+appeared in the front room of the place, and another materialized just
+outside the door, likewise with his gun.  And by certain other
+unmistakable signs it became plain to our perceptions that as between
+being a prisoner of the German army and being a guest there was really
+no great amount of difference.  It would have taken a mathematician to
+draw the distinction, so fine it was.
+
+We stayed in that taverne and in the small living room behind it, and in
+the small high-walled courtyard behind the living room, all that
+afternoon and that evening and that night, being visited at intervals by
+either the lieutenant or the sergeant, or both of them at once.  We
+dined lightly on soldiers' bread and some of the prince's wine--
+furnished by Rosenthal--and for dessert we had some shelled almonds and
+half a cake of chocolate--furnished by ourselves; also drinks of pale
+native brandy from the bar.
+
+During the evening we received several bulletins regarding the mythical
+automobile. Invariably Mittendorfer was desolated to be compelled to
+report that there had been another slight delay.  We knew he was
+desolated, because he said he was.  During the evening, also, we met all
+the regular members of the household living under that much-disturbed
+roof.  There was the husband, a big lubberly Fleming who apparently did
+not count for much in the economic and domestic scheme of the
+establishment; his wife, a large, commanding woman who ran the business
+and the house as well; his wife's mother, an old sickly woman in her
+seventies; and his wife's sister, a poor, palsied half-wit.
+
+When the sister was a child, so we heard, she had been terribly
+frightened, so that to this day, still frightened, she crept about, a
+pale shadow, quivering all over pitiably at every sound.  She would
+stand behind a door for minutes shaking so that you could hear her
+knuckles knocking against the wall.  She seemed particularly to dread
+the sight of the German privates who came and went; and they, seeing
+this, were kind to her in a clumsy, awkward way.  Hourly, like a ghost
+she drifted in and out.
+
+For a while it looked as though we should spend the night sitting up in
+chairs; but about ten o'clock three soldiers, led by Rosenthal and
+accompanied by the landlady, went out; and when they came back they
+brought some thick feather mattresses which had been commandeered from
+neighboring houses, we judged.  Also, through the goodness of his heart,
+Mittendorfer, who impressed us more and more as a strange compound of
+severity and softness, took pity on Gerbeaux and Stevens, and bringing
+them forth from that pestilential hole next door, he convoyed them in to
+stay overnight with us.  They told us that by now the air in the
+improvised prison was absolutely suffocating, what with the closeness,
+the fouled straw, the stale food and the proximity of so many dirty
+human bodies all packed into the kennel together.
+
+Ten of us slept on the floor of that little grogshop--the five of our
+party lying spoon-fashion on two mattresses, Gerbeaux and Stevens making
+seven, and three soldiers. The soldiers relieved each other in two-hour
+spells, so that while two of them snored by the door the third sat in a
+chair in the middle of the room, with his rifle between his knees, and a
+shaded lamp and a clock on a table at his elbow.  Just before we turned
+in, Rosenthal, who had adopted a paternal tone to the three guards, each
+of whom was many years older than he, addressed them softly, saying:
+
+"Now, my children, make yourselves comfortable.  Drink what you please;
+but if any one of you gets drunk I shall take pleasure in seeing that he
+gets from seven to nine years in prison at hard labor." For which they
+thanked him gratefully in chorus.
+
+I am not addicted to the diary-keeping habit, but during the next day,
+which was Friday, I made fragmentary records of things in a journal,
+from which I now quote verbatim:
+
+Seven-thirty a.  m.--about.  After making a brief toilet by sousing our
+several faces in a pail of water, we have just breakfasted--sketchily--
+on wine and almonds.  It would seem that the German army feeds its
+prisoners, but makes no such provision for its guests.  On the whole I
+think I should prefer being a prisoner.
+
+We have offered our landlady any amount within reason for a pot of
+coffee and some toasted bread; but she protests, calling on Heaven to
+witness the truth of her words, that there is nothing to eat in the
+house--that the Germans have eaten up all her store of food, and that
+her old mother is already beginning to starve.  Yet certain appetizing
+smells, which come down the staircase from upstairs when the door is
+opened, lead me to believe she is deceiving us.  I do not blame her for
+treasuring what she has for her own flesh and blood; but I certainly
+could enjoy a couple of fried eggs.
+
+Nine a.  m.  Mittendorfer has been in, with vague remarks concerning our
+automobile. Something warns me this young man is trifling with us.  He
+appears to be a practitioner of the Japanese school of diplomacy--that
+is, he believes it is better to pile one gentle, transparent fiction on
+another until the pyramid of romance falls of its own weight, rather
+than to break the cruel news at a single blow.
+
+Eleven-twenty.  One of the soldiers has brought us half a dozen bottles
+of good wine--three bottles of red and three of white--but the larder
+remains empty.  I do not know exactly what a larder is; but if it is as
+empty as I am at the present moment it must remind itself of a haunted
+house.
+
+Eleven-forty.  A big van full of wounded Germans has arrived.  From the
+windows we can see it distinctly.  The more seriously hurt lie on the
+bed of the wagon, under the hood. The man who drives has one leg in
+splints; and of the two who sit at the tail gate, holding rifles
+upright, one has a bandaged head, and the other has an arm in a sling.
+
+Unless a German is so seriously crippled as to be entirely unfitted for
+service he manages to do something useful.  There are no loose ends and
+no waste to the German military system; I can see that.  The soldiers in
+the street cheer the wounded as they pass and the wounded answer by
+singing Die Wacht am Rhein feebly.
+
+One poor chap raises his head and looks out.  He appears to be almost
+spent, but I see his lips move as he tries to sing.  You may not care
+for the German cause, but you are bound to admire the German spirit--the
+German oneness of purpose.
+
+Noon.  As the Texas darky said: "Dinnertime fur some folks; but just
+twelve o'clock fur me!" Again I smell something cooking upstairs.  On
+the mantel of the shabby little interior sitting room, where we spend
+most of our time sitting about in a sad circle, is a little black-and-
+tan terrier pup, stuffed and mounted, with shiny glass eyes--a family
+pet, I take it, which died and was immortalized by the local
+taxidermist. If I only knew what that dog was stuffed with I would take
+a chance and eat him.
+
+I have a fellow feeling for Arctic explorers who go north and keep on
+going until they run out of things to eat.  I admire their heroism and
+sympathize with their sufferings, but I deplore their bad judgment.
+There are grapes growing on trellises in the little courtyard at the
+back, but they are too green for human consumption.  I speak
+authoritatively on this subject, having just sampled one.
+
+Two p.m.  Tried to take a nap, but failed.  Hansen found a soiled deck
+of cards behind a pile of books on the mantelpiece, and we all cheered
+up, thinking of poker; but it was a Belgian deck of thirty-two cards,
+all the pips below the seven-spot being eliminated. Poker with that deck
+would be a hazardous pursuit.
+
+McCutcheon remarks casually that he wonders what would happen if
+somebody accidentally touched off those field-gun shells in the house
+two doors away.  We suddenly remember that they are all pointed our way!
+The conversation seems to lull, and Mac, for the time being, loses
+popularity.
+
+Two-thirty p.m.  Looking out on the dreary little square of this town
+of Beaumont I note that the natives, who have been scarce enough all
+day, have now vanished almost entirely; whereas soldiers are noticeably
+more numerous than they were this morning.
+
+Three-fifteen p.m.  Heard a big noise in the street and ran to the
+window in time to see about forty English prisoners passing under guard
+--the first English soldiers I have seen, in this campaign, either as
+prisoners or otherwise.  Their tan khaki uniforms and flat caps give
+them a soldierly look very unlike the slovenly, sloppy-appearing French
+prisoners in the guardhouse; but they appear to be tremendously
+downcast. The German soldiers crowd up to stare at them, but there is no
+jeering or taunting from the Germans.  These prisoners are all
+infantrymen, judging by their uniforms.  They disappear through the
+gateway of the prince's park.
+
+Three-forty.  I have just had some exercise; walked from the front door
+to the courtyard and back.  There are two guards outside the door now
+instead of one.  The German army certainly takes mighty good care of its
+guests.
+
+This day has been as long as Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," and much more
+tiresome.  No; I'll take that back; it is not strong enough.  This day
+has been as long as the entire Christian Era.
+
+Four p.m.  Gerbeaux, who was allowed to go out foraging, under escort
+of a guard, has returned with a rope of dried onions; a can of alphabet
+noodles; half a pound of stale, crumbly macaroons; a few fresh string
+beans; a pot of strained honey, and several clean collars of assorted
+sizes.  The woman of the-house is now making soup for us out of the
+beans, the onions and the noodles.  She has also produced a little
+grated Parmesan cheese from somewhere.
+
+Four-twenty p.m.  That was the best soup I ever tasted, even if it was
+full of typographical errors from the jumbling together of the little
+alphabet noodles.  Still, nobody but a proofreader could have found
+fault with that.  There was only one trouble with that soup: there was
+not enough of it--just one bowl apiece.  I would have traded the finest
+case of vintage wine in the Chimay vaults for another bowl.
+
+Just as the woman brought in the soup Mittendorfer appeared, escorting a
+French lieutenant who was taken prisoner this morning.  The prisoner was
+a little, handsome, dapper chap not over twenty-two years old, wearing
+his trim blue-and-red uniform with an air, even though he himself looked
+thoroughly miserable.  We were warned not to speak with him, or he with
+us; but Gerbeaux, after listening to him exchanging a few words with the
+lieutenant, said he judged from his accent that the little officer was
+from the south of France.
+
+We silently offered him a bowl of the soup as he sat in a corner fenced
+off from the rest of us by a small table; but he barely tasted it, and
+after a bit he lay down in his corner, with his arm for a pillow, and
+almost instantly was asleep, breathing heavily, like a man on the verge
+of exhaustion.  A few minutes later we heard, from Sergeant Rosenthal,
+that the prisoner's brother-in-law had been killed the day before, and
+that he--the little officer--had seen the brother-in-law fall.
+
+Five p.m.  We have had good news--two chunks of good news, in fact.
+We are to dine and we are to travel.  The sergeant has acquired, from
+unknown sources, a brace of small, skinny, fresh-killed pullets; eight
+fresh eggs; a big loaf of the soggy rye bread of the field mess; and
+wine unlimited.  Also, we are told that at nine o'clock we are to start
+for Brussels--not by automobile, but aboard a train carrying wounded and
+prisoners northward.
+
+Everybody cheers up, especially after ma-dame promises to have the fowls
+and the eggs ready in less than an hour.
+
+The Belgian photographer, who, it develops, is to go with our troop, has
+been brought in from the guardhouse and placed with us.  With the
+passing hours his fright has increased.  Gerbeaux says the poor devil is
+one of the leading photographers of Brussels--that by royal appointment
+he takes pictures of the queen and her children.  But the queen would
+have trouble in recognizing her photographer if she could see him now--
+with straw in his tousled hair, and his jaw lolling under the weight of
+his terror, and his big, wild eyes staring this way and that.  Nothing
+that Gerbeaux can say to him will dissuade him from the belief that the
+Germans mean to shoot him.
+
+I almost forgot to detail a thing that occurred a few minutes ago, just
+before the Belgian joined us.  Mittendorfer brought a message for the
+little French lieutenant.  The Frenchman roused up and, after they had
+saluted each other ceremoniously, Mittendorfer told him he had come to
+invite him to dine with a mess of German officers across the way, in the
+town hall.
+
+On the way out he stopped to speak with Sergeant Rosenthal who, having
+furnished the provender for the forthcoming feast, was now waiting to
+share in it.  Using German, the lieutenant said:
+
+"I'm being kept pretty busy.  Two citizens of this town have just been
+sentenced to be shot, and I've orders to go and attend to the shooting
+before it gets too dark for the firing squad to see to aim."
+
+Rosenthal did not ask of what crime the condemned two had been
+convicted.
+
+"You had charge of another execution this morning, didn't you?" he said.
+
+"Yes," answered the lieutenant; "a couple--man and wife.  The man was
+seventy-four years old and the woman was seventy-two.  It was proved
+against them that they put poisoned sugar in the coffee for some of our
+soldiers.  You heard about the case, didn't you?"
+
+"I heard something about it," said Rosenthal.
+
+That was all they said.  After three weeks of war a tragedy like this
+has become commonplace, not only to these soldiers but to us.  Already
+all of us, combatants and onlookers alike, have seen so many horrors
+that one more produces no shock in our minds.  It will take a wholesale
+killing to excite us; these minor incidents no longer count with us.  If
+I wrote all day I do not believe I could make the meaning of war, in its
+effects on the minds of those who view it at close hand, any clearer.  I
+shall not try.
+
+Six-fifteen p.m.  We have dined.  The omelet was a very small omelet,
+and two skinny pullets do not go far among nine hungry men; still, we
+have dined.
+
+My journal breaks off with this entry.  It broke off because immediately
+after dinner word came that our train was ready.  A few minutes before
+we left the taverne for the station, to start on a trip that was to last
+two days instead of three hours, and land us not in Brussels, but on
+German soil in Aix-la-Chapelle, two incidents happened which afterward,
+in looking back on the experience, I have found most firmly clinched in
+my memory: A German captain came into the place to get a drink; he
+recognized me as an American and hailed me, and wanted to know my
+business and whether I could give him any news from the outside world.
+I remarked on the perfection of his English.
+
+"I suppose I come by it naturally," he said.  "I call myself a German,
+but I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and partly reared in New Jersey,
+and educated at Princeton; and at this moment I am a member of the New
+York Cotton Exchange."
+
+Right after this three Belgian peasants, all half-grown boys, were
+brought in.  They had run away from their homes at the coming of the
+Germans, and for three days had been hiding in thickets, without food,
+until finally hunger and cold had driven them in.
+
+All of them were in sorry case and one was in collapse.  He trembled so
+his whole body shook like jelly.  The landlady gave him some brandy, but
+the burning stuff choked his throat until it closed and the brandy ran
+out of his quivering blue lips and spilled on his chin.  Seeing this, a
+husky German private, who looked as though in private life he might be a
+piano mover, brought out of his blanket roll a bottle of white wine and,
+holding the scared, exhausted lad against his chest, ministered to him
+with all gentleness, and gave him sips of the wine.  In the line of duty
+I suppose he would have shot that boy with the same cheerful readiness.
+
+Just as we were filing out into the dark, Sergeant Rosenthal, who was
+also going along, halted us and reminded us all and severally that we
+were not prisoners, but still guests; and that, though we were to march
+with the prisoners to the station, we were to go in line with the
+guards; and if any prisoner sought to escape it was hoped that we would
+aid in recapturing the runaway.  So we promised him, each on his word of
+honor, that we would do this; and he insisted that we should shake hands
+with him as a pledge and as a token of mutual confidence, which we
+accordingly did.  Altogether it was quite an impressive little
+ceremonial--and rather dramatic, I imagine.
+
+As he left us, however, he was heard, speaking in German, to say sotto
+voce to one of the guards:
+
+"If one of those journalists tries to slip away don't take any chances--
+shoot him at once!"
+
+It is so easy to keep one's honor intact when you have moral support in
+the shape of an earnest-minded German soldier, with a gun, stepping
+along six feet behind you.  My honor was never safer.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 6
+
+With the German Wrecking Crew
+
+
+When we came out of the little taverne at Beaumont, to start--as we
+fondly supposed--for Brussels, it was pitch dark in the square of the
+forlorn little town.  With us the polite and pleasant fiction that we
+were guests of the German authorities had already worn seedy, not to say
+threadbare, but Lieutenant Mittendorfer persisted in keeping the little
+romance alive.  For, as you remember, we had been requested--requested,
+mind you, and not ordered--to march to the station with the armed escort
+that would be in charge of the prisoners of war, and it had been
+impressed upon us that we were to assist in guarding the convoy,
+although no one of us had any more deadly weapon in his possession than
+a fountain pen; and finally, according to our instructions, if any
+prisoner attempted to escape in the dark we were to lay detaining hands
+upon him and hold him fast.
+
+This was all very flattering and very indicative of the esteem in which
+the military authorities of Beaumont seemed to hold us.  But we were not
+puffed up with a sense of our new responsibilities.  Also we were as a
+unit in agreeing that under no provocation would we yield to temptations
+to embark on any side-excursions upon the way to the railroad.
+Personally I know that I was particularly firm upon this point.  I would
+defy that column to move so fast that I could not keep up with it.
+
+In the black gloom we could make out a longish clump of men who stood
+four abreast, scuffling their feet upon the miry wet stones of the
+square.  These were the prisoners--one hundred and fifty Frenchmen and
+Turcos, eighty Englishmen and eight Belgians. From them, as we drew
+near, an odor of wet, unwashed animals arose.  It was as rank and raw as
+fumes from crude ammonia.  Then, in the town house of the Prince de
+Caraman-Chimay just alongside, the double doors opened, and the light
+streaming out fell upon the naked bayonets over the shoulders of the
+sentries and made them look like slanting lines of rain.
+
+There were eight of us by now in the party of guests, our original group
+of five having been swollen by the addition of three others--the
+Frenchman Gerbeaux, the American artist Stevens and the Belgian court-
+photographer Hennebert, who had been under arrest for five days.  We
+eight, obeying instructions--no, requests--found places for ourselves in
+the double files of guards, four going one side of the column and four
+the other.  I slipped into a gap on the left flank, alongside four of
+the English soldiers.  The guard immediately behind me was a man I knew.
+He had been on duty the afternoon previous in the place where we were
+being kept, and he had been obliging enough to let me exercise my few
+words of German upon him.  He grinned now in recognition and humorously
+patted the stock of his rifle--this last, I take it, being his effort to
+convey to my understanding that he was under orders to shoot me in the
+event of my seeking to play truant during the next hour or so.  He
+didn't know me--wild horses could not have dragged us apart.
+
+A considerable wait ensued.  Officers, coming back from the day's battle
+lines in automobiles, jumped out of their cars and pressed up,
+bedraggled and wet through from the rain which had been falling, to have
+a look at the prisoners.  Common soldiers appeared also.  Of these
+latter many, I judged, had newly arrived at the front and had never seen
+any captured enemies before.  They were particularly interested in the
+Englishmen, who as nearly as I could tell endured the scrutinizing
+pretty well, whereas the Frenchmen grew uneasy and self-conscious under
+it.  We who were in civilian dress--and pretty shabby civilian dress at
+that--came in for our share of examination too. The sentries were kept
+busy explaining to newcomers that we were not spies going north for
+trial.  There was little or no jeering at the prisoners.
+
+Lieutenant Mittendorfer appeared to feel the burden of his authority
+mightily.  His importance expressed itself in many bellowing commands to
+his men.  As he passed the door of headquarters, booming like a Prussian
+night-bittern, one of the officers there checked him with a gesture.
+
+"Why all the noise, Herr Lieutenant?" he said pleasantly in German.
+"Cannot this thing be done more quietly?"
+
+The young man took the hint, and when he climbed upon a bench outside
+the wine-shop door his voice was much milder as he admonished the
+prisoners that they would be treated with due honors of war if they
+obeyed their warders promptly during the coming journey, but that the
+least sign of rebellion among them would mean but one thing--immediate
+death.  Since he spoke in German, a young French lieutenant translated
+the warning for the benefit of the Frenchmen and the Belgians, and a
+British noncom. did the same for his fellow countrymen, speaking with a
+strong Scottish burr.  He wound up with an improvisation of his own,
+which I thought was typically British.  "Now, then, boys," he sang out,
+"buck up, all of you! It might be worse, you know, and some of these
+German chaps don't seem a bad lot at all."
+
+So, with that, Lieutenant Mittendorfer blew out his big chest and barked
+an order into the night, and away we all swung off at a double quick,
+with our feet slipping and sliding upon the travel-worn granite boulders
+underfoot.  In addition to being rounded and unevenly laid, the stones
+were now coated with a layer of slimy mud.  It was a hard job to stay
+upright on them.
+
+I don't think I shall ever forget that march.  I know I shall never
+forget that smell, or the sound of all our feet clumping over those
+slick cobbles.  Nor shall I forget, either, the appealing calls of
+Gerbeaux' black chauffeur, who was being left behind in the now empty
+guardhouse, and who, to judge from his tones, did not expect ever to see
+any of us again.  As a matter of fact, I ran across him two weeks later
+in Liege.  He had just been released and was trying to make his way back
+to Brussels.
+
+The way ahead of us was inky black.  The outlines of the tall Belgian
+houses on either side of the narrow street were barely visible, for
+there were no lights in the windows at all and only dim candles or oil
+lamps in the lower floors.  No natives showed themselves.  I do not
+recollect that in all that mile-long tramp I saw a single Belgian
+civilian--only soldiers, shoving forward curiously as we passed and
+pressing the files closer in together.
+
+Through one street we went and into another which if anything was even
+narrower and blacker than the first, and presently we could tell by the
+feel of things under our feet that we had quit the paved road and were
+traversing soft earth.  We entered railway sidings, stumbling over the
+tracks, and at the far end of the yard emerged into a sudden glare of
+brightness and drew up alongside a string of cars.
+
+After the darkness the flaring brilliancy made us blink and then it made
+us wonder there should be any lights at all, seeing that the French
+troops, in retiring from Beaumont four days before, had done their
+hurried best to cripple the transportation facilities and had certainly
+put the local gas plant out of commission.  Yet here was illumination in
+plenty and to spare.  At once the phenomenon stood explained.  Two days
+after securing this end of the line the German engineers had repaired
+the torn-up right-of-way and installed a complete acetylene outfit, and
+already they were dispatching trains of troops and munitions clear
+across southeastern Belgium to and from the German frontier.  When we
+heard this we quit marveling.  We had by now ceased to wonder at the
+lightning rapidity and un-human efficiency of the German military system
+in the field.
+
+Under the sizzling acetylene torches we had our first good look at these
+prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly prisoners.
+
+Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle.  A
+soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden
+a pitiable, almost a contemptible object.  You think instinctively of an
+adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of
+teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more
+impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in
+the first place. These similes are poor ones, I'm afraid, but I find it
+difficult to put my thoughts exactly into words.
+
+These particular soldiers were most unhappy looking, all except the half
+dozen Turcos among the Frenchmen.  They spraddled their baggy white legs
+and grinned comfortably, baring fine double rows of ivory in their brown
+faces.  The others mainly were droopy figures of misery and shame.  By
+reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung down in
+their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red trousers
+and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed
+themselves especially unkempt and frowzy-looking.  Almost to a man they
+were dark, lean, slouchy fellows; they were from the south of France, we
+judged.  Certainly with a week's growth of black whiskers upon their
+jaws they were fit now to play stage brigands without further make-up.
+
+"Wot a bloomin', stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from
+where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies.  "There
+ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink in it,
+too."
+
+A little whiny man alongside of me, whose chin was on his breast bone,
+spake downward along his gray flannel shirt bosom:
+
+"Just wyte," he said; "just wyte till England 'ears wot they done to us,
+'erdin' us about like cattle.  Blighters!" He spat his disgust upon the
+ground.
+
+We spoke to none of them directly, nor they to us--that also being a
+condition imposed by Mittendorfer.
+
+The train was composed of several small box cars and one second-class
+passenger coach of German manufacture with a dumpy little locomotive at
+either end, one to pull and one to push.  In profile it would have
+reminded you somewhat of the wrecking trains that go to disasters in
+America.  The prisoners were loaded aboard the box cars like so many
+sheep, with alert gray shepherds behind them, carrying guns in lieu of
+crooks; and, being entrained, they were bedded down for the night upon
+straw.
+
+The civilians composing our party were bidden to climb aboard the
+passenger coach, where the eight of us, two of the number being of
+augmented super-adult size, took possession of a compartment meant to
+hold six.  The other compartments were occupied by wounded Germans,
+except one compartment, which was set aside for the captive French
+lieutenant and two British subalterns.  Top-Sergeant Rosenthal was in
+charge of the train with headquarters aboard our coach.  With him, as
+aides, he had three Red Cross men.
+
+The lighting apparatus of the car did not operate.  On the ledge of our
+window sat a small oil lamp, sending out a rich smell and a pale, puny
+illumination.  Just before we pulled out Rosenthal came and blew out the
+lamp, leaving the wick to smoke abominably.  He explained that he did
+this for our own well-being.  Belgian snipers just outside the town had
+been firing into the passing trains, he said, and a light in a car
+window was but an added temptation.  He advised us that if shooting
+started we should drop upon the floor. We assured him in chorus that we
+would, and then after adding that we must not be surprised if the
+Belgians derailed the train during the night he went away, leaving us
+packed snugly in together in the dark.  This incident had a tendency to
+discourage light conversation among us for some minutes.
+
+Possibly it was because daylight travel would be safer travel, or it may
+have been for some other good and sufficient reason, that after
+traveling some six or eight miles joltingly we stopped in the edge of a
+small village and stayed there until after sun-up. That was a hard night
+for sleeping purposes.  One of our party, who was a small man, climbed
+up into the baggage net above one row of seats and stretched himself
+stiffly in the narrow hammock-like arrangement, fearing to move lest he
+tumble down on the heads of his fellow-sufferers.  Another laid him down
+in the little aisle flanking the compartment, where at least he might
+spraddle his limbs and where also, persons passing the length of the car
+stepped upon his face and figure from time to time.  This interfered
+with his rest. The remaining six of us mortised ourselves into the seats
+in neck-cricking attitudes, with our legs so intertwined and mingled
+that when one man got up to stretch himself he had to use great care in
+picking out his own legs.  Sometimes he could only tell that it was his
+leg by pinching it.  This was especially so after inaction had put his
+extremities to sleep while the rest of him remained wide awake.
+
+After dawn we ran slowly to Charleroi, the center of the Belgian iron
+industry, in a sterile land of mines and smelters and slag-heaps, and
+bleak, bare, ore-stained hillsides.  The Germans had fought here, first
+with organized troops of the Allies, and later, by their own telling,
+with bushwhacking civilians.  Whole rows of houses upon either side of
+the track had been ventilated by shells or burned out with fire, and
+their gable ends, lacking roofs, now stood up nakedly, fretting the
+skyline like gigantic saw teeth.  As we were drawing out from between
+these twin rows of ruins we saw a German sergeant in a flower plot
+alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump
+of tall red geraniums.  That he could find time in the midst of that
+hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically
+German bit of sentimentalism.  Just then, though, he stood erect and we
+were better informed.  He had been talking over a military telephone,
+the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter
+snuggling beneath the geraniums.  The flowers even were being made to
+contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism of war.  I think,
+though, that it took a composite German mind to evolve that expedient.
+A Prussian would bring along the telephone; a Saxon would bed it among
+the blossoms.
+
+We progressed onward by a process of alternate stops and starts, through
+a land bearing remarkably few traces to show for its recent chastening
+with sword and torch, until in the middle of the blazing hot forenoon we
+came to Gembloux, which I think must be the place where all the flies in
+Belgium are spawned.  Here on a siding we lay all day, grilled in the
+heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger vermin, while troop
+trains without number passed us, hurrying along the sentry-guarded
+railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium.  Every box-car door made a
+frame for a group-picture of broad German faces and bulky German bodies.
+Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers had lashed limbs of trees
+and big clumps of field flowers.  Also with colored chalks they had
+extensively frescoed the wooden walls as high up as they could reach.
+The commonest legend was "On to Paris," or for variety "To Paris
+Direct," but occasionally a lighter touch showed itself.  For example,
+one wag had inscribed on a car door: "Declarations of War Received
+Here," and another had drawn a highly impressionistic likeness of his
+Kaiser, and under it had inscribed "Wilhelm II, Emperor of Europe."
+
+Presently as train after train, loaded sometimes with guns or supplies
+but usually with men, clanked by, it began to dawn upon us that these
+soldiers were of a different physical type from the soldiers we had seen
+heretofore.  They were all Germans, to be sure, but the men along the
+front were younger men, hard-bitten and trained down, with the face
+which we had begun to call the Teutonic fighting face, whereas these men
+were older, and of a heavier port and fuller fashion of countenance.
+Also some of them wore blue coats, red-trimmed, instead of the dull gray
+service garb of the troops in the first invading columns.  Indeed some
+of them even wore a nondescript mixture of uniform and civilian garb.
+They were Landwehr and Landsturm, troops of the third and fourth lines,
+going now to police the roads and garrison the captured towns, and hold
+the lines of communication open while the first line, who were picked
+troops, and the second line, who were reservists, pressed ahead into
+France.
+
+They showed a childlike curiosity to see the prisoners in the box cars
+behind us.  They grinned triumphantly at the Frenchmen and the
+Britishers, but the sight of a Turco in his short jacket and his dirty
+white skirts invariably set them off in derisive cat-calling and
+whooping.  One beefy cavalryman in his forties, who looked the Bavarian
+peasant all over, boarded our car to see what might be seen.  He had
+been drinking.  He came nearer being drunk outright than any German
+soldier I had seen to date.  Because he heard us talking English he
+insisted on regarding us as English spies.
+
+"Hark! they betray themselves," we heard him mutter thickly to one of
+his wounded countrymen in the next compartment.  "They are damned
+Englishers."
+
+"Nein! Nein! All Americans," we heard the other say.
+
+"Well, if they are Americans, why don't they talk the American language
+then?" he demanded.  Hearing this, I was sorry I had neglected in my
+youth to learn Choctaw.
+
+Still dubious of us, he came now and stood in the aisle, rocking
+slightly on his bolster legs and eying us glassily.  Eventually a
+thought pierced the fog of his understanding.  He hauled his saber out
+of its scabbard and invited us to run our fingers along the edge and see
+how keen and sharp it was.  He added, with appropriate gestures, that he
+had honed it with the particular intent of slicing off a few English
+heads.  For one, and speaking for one only, I may say I was, on the
+whole, rather glad when he departed from among us.
+
+When we grew tired of watching the troop trains streaming south we
+fought the flies, and listened for perhaps the tenth time to the story
+of Stevens' experience when he first fell into German hands, six days
+before.
+
+Stevens was the young American who accompanied Gerbeaux, the Frenchman,
+and Hennebert, the Belgian, on their ill-timed expedition from Brussels
+in an automobile bearing without authority a Red Cross flag.  Gerbeaux
+was out to get a story for the Chicago paper which he served as Brussels
+correspondent, and the Belgian hoped to take some photographs; but a
+pure love of excitement brought Stevens along.  He had his passport to
+prove his citizenship and a pass from General von Jarotzky, military
+commandant of Brussels, authorizing him to pass through the lines.  He
+thought he was perfectly safe.
+
+When their machine was halted by the Germans a short distance south and
+west of Waterloo, Stevens, for some reason which he could never
+understand, was separated from his two companions and the South-African
+negro chauffeur.  A sergeant took him in charge, and all the rest of the
+day he rode on the tail of a baggage wagon with a guard upon either side
+of him.  First, though, he was searched and all his papers were taken
+from him.
+
+Late in the afternoon the pack-train halted and as Stevens was
+stretching his legs in a field a first lieutenant, whom he described as
+being tall and nervous and highly excitable, ran up and, after berating
+the two guards for not having their rifles ready to fire, he poked a gun
+under Stevens' nose and went through the process of loading it,
+meanwhile telling him that if he moved an inch his brains would be blown
+out.  A sergeant gently edged Stevens back out of the danger belt, and,
+from behind the officer's back another man, so Stevens said, tapped
+himself gently upon the forehead to indicate that the Herr Lieutenant
+was cracked in the brain.
+
+After this Stevens was taken into an improvised barracks in a deserted
+Belgian gendarmerie and locked in a room.  At nine o'clock the
+lieutenant came to him and told him in a mixture of French and German
+that he had by a court-martial been found guilty of being an English spy
+and that at six o'clock the following morning he would be shot. "When
+you hear a bugle sound you may know that is the signal for your
+execution," the officer added.
+
+While poor Stevens was still begging for an opportunity to be heard in
+his own defense the lieutenant dealt him a blow in the side which left
+him temporarily breathless.  In a moment two soldiers had crossed his
+wrists behind his back and were lashing them tightly together with a
+rope.
+
+Thus bound he was taken back indoors and made to sit on a bench.  Eight
+soldiers stretched themselves upon the floor of the room and slept
+there; a sergeant slept with his body across the door.  A guard sat on
+the bench beside Stevens.
+
+"He gave me two big slugs of brandy to drink," said Stevens, continuing
+his tale, "and it affected me no more than so much water.  After a
+couple of hours I managed to work the cords loose and I got one hand
+free.  Moving cautiously I lifted my feet, and by stretching my arms
+cautiously down, still holding them behind my back, I untied one shoe.
+I meant at the last to kick off my shoes and run for it.  I was feeling
+for the laces on my other shoe when another guard came to re-enforce the
+first, and he watched me so closely that I knew that chance was gone.
+
+"After a while, strange as it seems, all the fear and all the horror of
+death left me.  My chief regret now was, not that I had to die, but that
+my people at home would never know how I died or where.  I put my head
+down on the table and actually dozed off.  But there was a clock in the
+room and whenever it struck I would rouse up and say to myself, almost
+impersonally, that I now had four hours to live, or three, or two, as
+the case might be.  Then I would go to sleep again.  Once or twice a
+queer sinking sensation in my stomach, such as I never felt before,
+would come to me, but toward daylight this ceased to occur.
+
+"At half-past five two soldiers, one carrying a spade and the other a
+lantern, came in. They lit the lantern at a lamp that burned on a table
+in front of me and went out. Presently I could hear them digging in the
+yard outside the door.  I believed it was my grave they were digging.  I
+cannot recall that this made any particular impression upon me.  I
+considered it in a most casual sort of fashion.  I remember wondering
+whether it was a deep grave.
+
+"At five minutes before six a bugle sounded.  The eight men on the floor
+got up, buckled on their cartridge belts, shouldered their rifles and,
+leaving their knapsacks behind, tramped out.  I followed with my guards
+upon either side of me.  My one fear now was that I should tremble at
+the end.  I felt no fear, but I was afraid my knees would shake.  I
+remember how relieved I was when I took the first step to find my legs
+did not tremble under me.
+
+"I was resolved, too, that I would not be shot down with my hands tied
+behind me.  When I faced the squad I meant to shake off the ropes on my
+wrists and take the volley with my arms at my sides."
+
+Stevens was marched to the center of the courtyard.  Then, without a
+word of explanation to him his bonds were removed and he was put in an
+automobile and carried off to rejoin the other members of the unlucky
+sightseeing party.  He never did find out whether he had been made the
+butt of a hideous practical joke by a half-mad brute or whether his
+tormentor really meant to send him to death and was deterred at the last
+moment by fear of the consequences.  One thing he did learn--there had
+been no court-martial.  Thereafter, during his captivity, Stevens was
+treated with the utmost kindness by all the officers with whom he came
+in contact.  His was the only instance that I have knowledge of where a
+prisoner has been tortured, physically or mentally, by a German.  It was
+curious that in this one case the victim should have been an American
+citizen whose intentions were perfectly innocent and whose papers were
+orthodox and unquestionable.
+
+Glancing back over what I have here written down I find I have failed
+altogether to mention the food which we ate on that trip of ours with
+the German wrecking crew.  It was hardly worth mentioning, it was so
+scanty.
+
+We had to eat, during that day while we lay at Gembloux, a loaf of the
+sourish soldiers' black bread, with green mold upon the crust, and a pot
+of rancid honey which one of the party had bethought him to bring from
+Beaumont in his pocket.  To wash this mixture down we had a few swigs of
+miserably bad lukewarm ration-coffee from a private's canteen, a bottle
+of confiscated Belgian mineral water, which a private at Charleroi gave
+us from his store, and a precious quart of the Prince de Caraman-
+Chimay's commandeered wine--also a souvenir of our captivity.  Late in
+the afternoon a sergeant sold us for a five-mark piece a big skin-casing
+filled with half-raw pork sausage.  I've never tasted anything better.
+
+Even so, we fared better than the prisoners in the box cars behind and
+the dozen wounded men in the coach with us.  They had only coffee and
+dry bread and, at the latter end of the long day, a few chunks of the
+sausage.  Some of the wounded men were pretty badly hurt, too.  There
+was one whose left forearm had been half shot away.  His stiff fingers
+protruded beyond his soiled bandages and they were still crusted with
+dried blood and grained with dirt.  Another had been pierced through the
+jaw with a bullet.  That part of his face which showed through the
+swathings about his head was terribly swollen and purple with congested
+blood.  The others had flesh wounds, mainly in their sides or their
+legs.  Some of them were feverish; all of them sorely needed clean
+garments for their bodies and fresh dressings for their hurts and proper
+food for their stomachs.  Yet I did not hear one of them complain or
+groan.
+
+With that oxlike patience of the North-European peasant breed, which
+seems accentuated in these Germans in time of war, they quietly endured
+what was acute discomfort for any sound man to have to endure.  In some
+dim, dumb fashion of their own they seemed, each one of them, to
+comprehend that in the vast organism of an army at war the individual
+unit does not count.  To himself he may be of prime importance and first
+consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a
+mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm--an infinitesimal, utterly
+inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought.  Thus we
+diagnosed their mental poses.  Along toward five o'clock a goodish
+string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars
+seven hundred French soldiers, who had been collected at Gembloux, were
+loaded. With the Frenchmen as they marched under our window went,
+perhaps, twenty civilian prisoners, including two priests and three or
+four subdued little men who looked as though they might be civic
+dignitaries of some small Belgian town.  In the squad was one big,
+broad-shouldered peasant in a blouse, whose arms were roped back at the
+elbows with a thick cord.
+
+"Do you see that man?" said one of our guards excitedly, and he pointed
+at the pinioned man.  "He is a grave robber.  He has been digging up
+dead Germans to rob the bodies. They tell me that when they caught him
+he had in his pockets ten dead men's fingers which he had cut off with a
+knife because the flesh was so swollen he could not slip the rings off.
+He will be shot, that fellow."
+
+We looked with a deeper interest then at the man whose arms were bound,
+but privately we permitted ourselves to be skeptical regarding the
+details of his alleged ghoulishness. We had begun to discount German
+stories of Belgian atrocities and Belgian stories of German atrocities.
+I might add that I am still discounting both varieties.
+
+To help along our train two more little engines were added, but even
+with four of them to draw and to shove their load was now so heavy that
+we were jerked along with sensations as though we were having a jaw
+tooth pulled every few seconds.  After such a fashion we progressed very
+slowly.  Already we knew that we were not going to Brussels, as we had
+been promised in Beaumont that we should go.  We only hoped we were not
+bound for a German military fortress in some interior city.
+
+It fell to my lot that second night to sleep in the aisle.  In spite of
+being walked on at intervals I slept pretty well.  When I waked it was
+three o'clock in the morning, just, and we were standing in the train
+shed at Liege, and hospital corps men were coming aboard with hot coffee
+and more raw sausages for the wounded.  Among the Germans, sausages are
+used medicinally.  I think they must keep supplies of sausages in their
+homes, for use in cases of accident and sickness.
+
+I got up and looked from the window.  The station was full of soldiers
+moving about on various errands.  Overhead big arc lights sputtered
+spitefully, so that the place was almost as bright as day.  Almost
+directly below me was a big table, which stood on the platform and was
+covered over with papers and maps.  At the table sat two officers--high
+officers, I judged--writing busily.  Their stiff white cuff-ends showed
+below their coat-sleeves; their slim black boots were highly polished,
+and altogether they had the look of having just escaped from the hands
+of a valet.  Between them and the frowsy privates was a gulf a thousand
+miles wide and a thousand miles deep.
+
+When I woke again it was broad daylight and we had crossed the border
+and were in Germany.  At small way stations women and girls wearing long
+white aprons and hospital badges came under the car windows with hot
+drinks and bacon sandwiches for the wounded.  They gave us some, too,
+and, I think, bestowed what was left upon the prisoners at the rear.  We
+ran now through a land untouched by war, where prim farmhouses stood in
+prim gardens.  It was Sunday morning and the people were going to church
+dressed in their Sunday best. Considering that Germany was supposed to
+have been drained of its able-bodied male adults for war-making purposes
+we saw, among the groups, an astonishingly large number of men of
+military age.  By contrast with the harried country from which we had
+just emerged this seemed a small Paradise of peace. Over there in
+Belgium all the conditions of life had been disorganized and undone,
+where they had not been wrecked outright.  Over here in Germany the calm
+was entirely unruffled.
+
+It shamed us to come as we were into such surroundings.  For our car was
+littered with sausage skins and bread crusts, and filth less pleasant to
+look at and stenches of many sorts abounded.  Indeed I shall go further
+and say that it stank most fearsomely.  As for us, we felt ourselves to
+be infamous offenses against the bright, clean day.  We had not slept in
+a bed for five nights or had our clothes off for that time.  For three
+days none of us had eaten a real meal at a regular table.  For two days
+we had not washed our faces and hands.
+
+The prisoners of war went on to Cologne to be put in a laager, but we
+were bidden to detrain at Aix-la-Chapelle.  We climbed off, a dirty,
+wrinkled, unshaven troop of vagabonds, to find ourselves free to go
+where we pleased.
+
+That is, we thought so at first. But by evening the Frenchman and the
+Belgians had been taken away to be held in prison until the end of the
+war, and for two days the highly efficient local secret-service staff
+kept the rest of us under its watchful care.  After that, though, the
+American consul, Robert J. Thompson, succeeded in convincing the
+military authorities that we were not dangerous.
+
+I still think that taking copious baths and getting ourselves shaved
+helped to clear us of suspicion.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 7
+
+The Grapes of Wrath
+
+
+There is a corner of Rhenish Prussia that shoulders up against Holland
+and drives a nudging elbow deep into the ribs of Belgium; and right
+here, at the place where the three countries meet, stands Charlemagne's
+ancient city of Aix-la-Chapelle, called Aachen by the Germans.
+
+To go from the middle of Aix-la-Chapelle to the Dutch boundary takes
+twenty minutes on a tram-car, and to go to the Belgian line requires an
+even hour in a horse-drawn vehicle, and considerably less than that
+presuming you go by automobile.  So you see the toes of the town touch
+two foreign frontiers; and of all German cities it is the most westerly
+and, therefore, closest of all to the zone of action in the west of
+Europe.
+
+You would never guess it, however.  When we landed in Aix-la-Chapelle,
+coming out of the heart of the late August hostilities in Belgium, we
+marveled; for, behold, here was a clean, white city that, so far as the
+look of it and the feel of it went, might have been a thousand miles
+from the sound of gunfire.  On that Sabbath morning of our arrival an
+air of everlasting peace abode with it.  That same air of peace
+continued to abide with it during all the days we spent here.  Yet, if
+you took a step to the southwest--a figurative step in seven-league
+boots--you were where all hell broke loose.  War is a most tremendous
+emphasizer of contrasts.
+
+These lines were written late in September, in a hotel room at Aix-la-
+Chapelle.  The writing of them followed close on an automobile trip to
+Liege, through a district blasted by war and corrugated with long
+trenches where those who died with their boots on still lie with their
+boots on.
+
+Let me, if I can, draw two pictures--one of this German outpost town,
+and the other of the things that might be seen four or five miles
+distant over the border.
+
+I have been told that, in the first flurry of the breaking out of the
+World-War, Aix was not placid.  It went spy-mad, just as all Europe went
+spy-mad--a mania from which this Continent has not entirely recovered by
+any means.  There was a great rounding up of suspected aliens.  Every
+loyal citizen resolved himself or herself into a self-appointed
+policeman, to watch the movements of those suspected of being disloyal.
+Also, they tell me, when the magic mobilization began and troops poured
+through without ceasing for four days and four nights, and fighting
+broke out just the other side of the Belgian customhouse, on the main
+high road to Liege, there was excitement.  But all that was over long
+before we came.
+
+The war has gone onward, down into France; and all the people know is
+what the official bulletins tell them; in fact, I think they must know
+less about operations and results than our own people in America.  I
+know not what the opportunity of the spectator may have been with regard
+to other wars, but certainly in this war it is true that the nearer you
+get to it the less you understand of its scope.
+
+All about you, on every side, is a screen of secrecy.  Once in a while
+it parts for a moment, and through the rift you catch a glimpse of the
+movement of armies and the swing and sweep of campaigns.  Then the
+curtain closes and again you are shut in.
+
+Let me put the case in another way: It is as though we who are at the
+front, or close to it, stand before a mighty painting, but with our
+noses almost touching the canvas.  You who are farther away see the
+whole picture.  We, for the moment, see only so much of it as you might
+cover with your two hands; but this advantage we do have--that we see
+the brush strokes, the color shadings, the infinite small detail,
+whereas you view its wider effects.
+
+And then, having seen it, when we try to put our story into words--when
+we try to set down on paper the unspeakable horror of it--we realize
+what a futile, incomplete thing the English language is.
+
+This present day in Aix-la-Chapelle will be, I assume, much like all the
+other days I have spent here.  An hour ago small official bulletins,
+sanctioned by the Berlin War Office, were posted in the windows of the
+shops and on the front of the public buildings; and small groups
+gathered before them to read the news.
+
+If it was good news they took it calmly.  If it was not so good, still
+they took it calmly.  If it was outright bad news I think they would
+still take it calmly.  For, come good or evil, they are all possessed
+now with the belief that, in the long run, Germany must win.  Their
+confidence is supreme.
+
+It was characteristic of them, though, that, until word came of the
+first German success, there was no general flying of flags in the town.
+Now flags are up everywhere--the colors of the Empire and of Prussia,
+and often enough just a huge yellow square bearing the spraddled, black,
+spidery design of the Imperial eagle.  But there is never any hysteria;
+I don't believe these Prussians know the meaning of the word.  It is
+safe to assume that out of every three grown men in front of a bulletin
+one will be a soldier.
+
+Yet, considering that Germany is supposed, at this moment, to have
+upward of five million men in the field or under arms, and that
+approximately two millions more, who were exempt from call by reason of
+age or other disabilities, are said to have volunteered, you would be
+astonished to see how many men in civilian dress are on the streets.
+Whether in uniform or not, though, these men are at work after some
+fashion or other for their country.  Practically all the physicians in
+Aix are serving in the hospitals. The rich men--the men of affairs--are
+acting as military clerks at headquarters or driving Red Cross cars.
+The local censor of the telegraph is over eighty years old--a splendid-
+looking old white giant, who won the Iron Cross in the Franco-Prussian
+War and retired with the rank of general years and years ago.  Now, in
+full uniform, he works twelve hard hours a day.  The head waiter at this
+hotel told me yesterday that he expected to be summoned to the colors in
+a day or two.  He has had his notice and is ready to go.  He is more
+than forty years old.  I know my room waiter kept watch on me until he
+satisfied himself I was what I claimed to be--an American--and not an
+English spy posing as an American.
+
+So, at first, did the cheery little girl cashier in the Arcade barber
+shop downstairs.  For all I know, she may still have me under suspicion
+and be making daily reports on me to the secret-service people.  The
+women help, too--and the children.  The wives and daughters of the
+wealthiest men in the town are minding the sick and the wounded.  The
+mothers and the younger girls meet daily to make hospital supplies.
+Women come to you in the cafes at night, wearing Red Cross badges on
+their left arms, and shaking sealed tin canisters into which you are
+expected to drop contributions for invalided soldiers.
+
+Since so many of their teachers are carrying rifles or wearing swords,
+the pupils of the grammar schools and the high schools are being
+organized into squads of crop-gatherers.  Beginning next week, so I
+hear, they will go out into the fields and the orchards to assist in the
+harvesting of the grain and the fruit.  For lack of hands to get it
+under cover the wheat has already begun to suffer; but the boys and
+girls will bring it in.
+
+It is now half-past eleven o'clock in the forenoon.  At noon, sharp, an
+excellent orchestra will begin to play in the big white casino
+maintained by the city, just opposite my hotel.  It will play for an
+hour then, and again this afternoon, and again, weather permitting,
+to-night.
+
+The townspeople will sit about at small, white tables and listen to the
+music while they sip their beer or drink their coffee.  They will be
+soberer and less vivacious than I imagine they were two months ago; but
+then these North Germans are a sober-minded race anyhow, and they take
+their amusements quietly.  Also, they have taken the bad tidings of the
+last few days from France very quietly.
+
+During the afternoon crowds will gather on the viaduct, just above the
+principal railroad station, where they will stand for hours looking down
+over the parapet into the yards below.  There will be smaller crowds on
+the heights of Ronheide, on the edge of the town, where the tracks enter
+the long tunnel under one of the hills that etch the boundary between
+Germany and Belgium.
+
+Rain or shine, these two places are sure to be black with people, for
+here they may see the trains shuttle by, like long bobbins in a loom
+that never ceases from its weaving--trains going west loaded with
+soldiers and naval reservists bound for the front, and trains headed
+east bearing prisoners and wounded.  The raw material passes one way--
+that's the new troops; the finished product passes the other--the
+wounded and the sick.
+
+When wounded men go by there will be cheering, and some of the women are
+sure to raise the song of Die Wacht am Rhein; and within the cars the
+crippled soldiers will take up the chorus feebly.  God knows how many
+able-bodied soldiers already have gone west; how many maimed and
+crippled ones have gone east! In the first instance the number must run
+up into the second million; of the latter there must have been well
+above two hundred thousand.
+
+No dead come back from the front--at least, not this way.  The Germans
+bury their fallen soldiers where they fall.  Regardless of his rank, the
+dead man goes into a trench. If so be he died in battle he is buried,
+booted and dressed just as he died.  And the dead of each day must be
+got underground before midnight of that same day--that is the hard-and-
+fast rule wherever the Germans are holding their ground or pressing
+forward. There they will lie until the Judgment Day, unless their
+kinsfolk be of sufficient wealth and influence to find their burial
+places and dig them up and bring them home privily for interment.  Even
+so, it may be days or even weeks after a man is dead and buried before
+his people hear of it.  It may be they will not hear of it until a
+letter written to him in the care of his regiment and his company comes
+back unopened, with one word in sinister red letters on it--Gefallen!
+
+At this hotel, yesterday, I saw a lady dressed in heavy black.  She had
+the saddest, bravest face I ever looked into, I think.  She sat in the
+restaurant with two other ladies, who were also in black.  The
+octogenarian censor of telegrams passed them on the way out.  To her two
+companions he bowed deeply, but at her side he halted and, bending very
+low, he kissed her hand, and then went away without a word.
+
+The head waiter, who knows all the gossip of the house and of half the
+town besides, told us about her.  Her only son, a lieutenant of
+artillery, was killed at the taking of Liege. It was three days before
+she learned of his death, though she was here in Aachen, only a few
+miles away; for so slowly as this does even bad news travel in war times
+when it pertains to the individual.
+
+Another week elapsed before her husband, who is a lieutenant-colonel,
+could secure leave of absence and return from the French border to seek
+for his son's body; and there was still another week of searching before
+they found it.  It was at the bottom of a trench, under the bodies of a
+score or more of his men; and it was in such a state that the mother had
+not been permitted to look on her dead boy's face.
+
+Such things as this must be common enough hereabouts, but one hears very
+little of them and sees even less.  Aix-la-Chapelle has suffered most
+heavily.  The Aix regiment was shot to pieces in the first day's
+fighting at Liege.  Nearly half its members were killed or wounded; but
+astonishingly few women in mourning are to be seen on the street, and
+none of the men wear those crape arm bands that are so common in Europe
+ordinarily; nor, except about the railroad station, are very many
+wounded to be seen.
+
+There are any number of wounded privates in the local hospitals; but
+there must be a rule against their appearance in public places, for it
+is only occasionally that I meet one abroad.  Slightly wounded officers
+are more plentiful.  I judge from this that no such restriction applies
+to them as applies to the common soldiers.  This hotel is full of them--
+young officers mostly, with their heads tied up or their arms in black
+silk slings, or limping about on canes or crutches.
+
+Until a few days ago the columns of the back pages of the Aix and
+Cologne papers were black-edged with cards inserted by relatives in
+memory of officers who had fallen--"For King and Fatherland!" the cards
+always said.  I counted thirteen of these death notices in one issue of
+a Cologne paper.  Now they have almost disappeared.  I imagine that,
+because of the depressing effect of such a mass of these publications on
+the public mind, the families of killed officers have been asked to
+refrain from reciting their losses in print.  Yet there are not wanting
+signs that the grim total piles up by the hour and the day.
+
+Late this afternoon, when I walk around to the American consulate, I
+shall pass the office of the chief local paper; and there I am sure to
+find anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred men and women waiting for
+the appearance on a bulletin board of the latest list of dead, wounded
+and missing men who are credited to Aix-la-Chapelle and its vicinity.  A
+new list goes up each afternoon, replacing the list of the day before.
+Sometimes it contains but a few names; sometimes a good many.  Then
+there will be piteous scenes for a little while; but presently the
+mourners will go away, struggling to compose themselves as they go; for
+their Kaiser has asked them to make no show of their loss among their
+neighbors.  Having made the supremest sacrifice they can make, short of
+offering up their own lives, they now make another and hide their grief
+away from sight. Surely, this war spares none at all--neither those who
+fight nor those who stay behind.
+
+Toward dusk the streets will fill up with promenaders.  Perhaps a
+regiment or so of troops, temporarily quartered here on the way to the
+front, will clank by, bound for their barracks in divers big music
+halls.  The squares may be quite crowded with uniforms; or there may be
+only one gray coat in proportion to three or four black ones--this last
+is the commoner ratio.  It all depends on the movements of the forces.
+
+To-night the cafes will be open and the moving-picture places will run
+full blast; and the free concert will go on and there will be services
+in the cathedral of Charlemagne.  The cafes that had English names when
+the war began have German ones now.  Thus the Bristol has become the
+Crown Prince Café, and the Piccadilly is the Germania; but otherwise
+they are just as they were before the war started, and the business in
+them is quite as good, the residents say, as it ever was.  Prices are no
+higher than they used to be--at least I have not found them high.
+
+After the German fashion the diners will eat slowly and heavily; and
+afterward they will sit in clusters of three or four, drinking mugs of
+Munich or Pilsner, and talking deliberately. At the Crown Prince there
+will be dancing, and at two or three other places there will be music
+and maybe singing; but at the Kaiserhof, where I shall dine, there is
+nothing more exciting than beer and conversation.  It was there, two
+nights ago, I met at the same time three Germans representing three
+dominant classes in the life of their country, and had from each of them
+the viewpoint of his class toward the war.  They were, respectively, a
+business man, a scientist, and a soldier.  The business man belongs to a
+firm of brothers which ranks almost with the Krupps in commercial
+importance.  It has branches in many cities and agencies and plants in
+half a dozen countries.  He said:
+
+"We had not our daily victory to-day, eh? Well, so it goes; we must not
+expect to win always.  We must have reverses, and heavy ones too; but in
+the end we must win.  To lose now would mean national extinction.  To
+win means Germany's commercial and military preeminence in this
+hemisphere.
+
+"There can be but one outcome of this war--either Germany, as an empire,
+will cease to exist, or she will emerge the greatest Power, except the
+United States, on the face of the earth.  And so sure are we of the
+result that to-day my brothers and I bought ground for doubling the size
+and capacity of our largest plant.
+
+"In six weeks from now we shall have beaten France; in six months we
+shall have driven Russia to cover.  For England it will take a year--
+perhaps longer.  And then, as in all games, big and little, the losers
+will pay.  France will be made to pay an indemnity from which she will
+never recover.
+
+"Of Belgium I think we shall take a slice of seacoast; Germany needs
+ports on the English Channel.  Russia will be so humbled that no longer
+will the Muscovite peril threaten Europe.  Great Britain we shall crush
+utterly.  She shall be shorn of her navy and she shall lose her
+colonies--certainly she shall lose India and Egypt.  She will become a
+third-class Power and she will stay a third-class Power.  Forget Japan--
+Germany will punish Japan in due season.
+
+"Within five years from now I predict there will be an offensive and
+defensive alliance of all the Teutonic and all the Scandinavian races of
+Europe, with Bulgaria included, holding absolute dominion over this
+continent and stretching in an unbroken line from the North Sea to the
+Adriatic and the Black Sea.
+
+"Europe is to have a new map, my friends, and Germany will be in the
+middle of that map.  When this has been accomplished we shall talk about
+disarmament--not before. And first, we shall disarm our enemies who
+forced this war on us."
+
+The scientist spoke next.  He is a tall, spectacled, earnest
+Westphalian, who has invented and patented over a hundred separate
+devices used in electric-lighting properties, and, in between, has found
+time to travel round the world several times and write a book or two.
+
+"I do not believe in war," he said.  "War has no place in the
+civilization of the world to-day; but this war was inevitable.  Germany
+had to expand or be suffocated.  And out of this war good will come for
+all the world, especially for Europe.  We Germans are the most
+industrious, the most earnest and the best-educated race on this side of
+the ocean.  To-day one-fourth of the population of Belgium cannot read
+and write.  Under German influence illiteracy will disappear from among
+them.  Russia stands for reaction; England for selfishness and perfidy;
+France for decadence.  Germany stands for progress.  Do not believe the
+claims of our foes that our Kaiser wishes to be another Napoleon and
+hold Europe under his thumb.  What he wants for Germany and what he
+means to have is, first, breathing room for his people; and after that a
+fair share of the commercial opportunities of the world.
+
+"German enlightenment and German institutions will do the reSt. And
+after this war--if we Germans win it--there will never be another
+universal war."
+
+The soldier spoke last. He is a captain of field artillery, a member of
+a distinguished Prussian family, and one of the most noted big-game
+hunters in Europe.  Three weeks ago, in front of Charleroi, a French
+sharpshooter put a bullet in him.  It passed through his left forearm,
+pierced one lung and lodged in the muscles of his breast, where it lies
+imbedded.  In a week from now he expects to rejoin his command.
+
+To look at him you would never guess that he had so recently been
+wounded; his color is high and he moves with the stiff, precise
+alertness of the German army man.  He is still wearing the coat he wore
+in the fight; there are two ragged little holes in the left sleeve and a
+puncture in the side of it; and it is spotted with stiff, dry, brown
+stains.
+
+"I don't presume to know anything about the political or commercial
+aspects of this war," he said over his beer mug; "but I do know this:
+War was forced on us by these other Powers.  They were jealous of us and
+they made the Austrian-Servian quarrel their quarrel.  But when war came
+we were ready and they were not.
+
+"Not until the mobilization was ordered did the people of Germany know
+the color of the field uniform of their soldiers; yet four millions of
+these service uniforms were made and finished and waiting in our
+military storehouses.  Not until after the first shot was fired did we
+who are in the army know how many army corps we had, or the names of
+their commanders, or even the names of the officers composing the
+general staff.
+
+"A week after we took the field our infantry, in heavy marching order,
+was covering fifty kilometers a day--thirty of your American miles--and
+doing it day after day without straggling and without any footsore men
+dropping behind.
+
+"Do these things count in the sum total? I say they do.  Our army will
+win because it deserves to win through being ready and being complete
+and being efficient.  Don't discount the efficiency of our navy either.
+Remember, we Germans have the name of being thorough.  When our fleet
+meets the British fleet I think you will find that we have a few Krupp
+surprises for them."
+
+I may meet these confident gentlemen tonight.  If not, it is highly
+probable I shall meet others who are equally confident, and who will
+express the same views, which they hold because they are the views of
+the German people.
+
+At eleven o'clock, when I start back to the hotel, the streets will be
+almost empty.  Aix will have gone to bed, and in bed it will peacefully
+stay unless a military Zeppelin sails over its rooftrees, making a noise
+like ten million locusts all buzzing at once.  There were two Zeppelins
+aloft last night, and from my window I saw one of them quite plainly.
+It was hanging almost stationary in the northern sky, like a huge yellow
+gourd.  After a while it made off toward the weSt. One day last week
+three of them passed, all bound presumably for Paris or Antwerp, or even
+London.  That time the people grew a bit excited; but now they take a
+Zeppelin much as a matter of course, and only wonder mildly where it
+came from and whither it is going.
+
+As for to-morrow, I imagine to-morrow will be another to-day; but
+yesterday was different. I had a streak of luck.  It is forbidden to
+civilians, and more particularly to correspondents, to go prowling about
+eastern Belgium just now; but I found a friend in a naturalized German-
+American, formerly of Chicago, but living now in Germany, though he
+still retains his citizenship in the United States.
+
+Like every one else in Aachen, he is doing something for the government,
+though I can only guess at the precise nature of his services.  At any
+rate he had an automobile, a scarce thing to find in private hands in
+these times; and, what was more, he had a military pass authorizing him
+to go to Liege and to take two passengers along.  He invited me to go
+with him for a day's ride through the country where the very first blows
+were swapped in the western theater of hostilities.
+
+We started off in the middle of a fickle-minded shower, which first blew
+puffs of wetness in our faces, like spray on a flawy day at sea, and
+then broke off to let the sun shine through for a minute or two.  For
+two or three kilometers after clearing the town we ran through a
+district that smiled with peace and groaned with plenty.  On the
+verandas of funny little gray roadhouses with dripping red roofs
+officers sat over their breakfast coffee.  A string of wagons passed us,
+bound inward, full of big, white, clean-looking German pigs.  A road
+builder, repairing the ruts made by the guns and baggage trains, stood
+aside for us to pass and pulled off his hat to us.  This was Europe as
+it used to be--Europe as most American tourists knew it.
+
+We came to a tall barber pole which a careless painter had striped with
+black on white instead of with red on white, and we knew by that we had
+arrived at the frontier.  Also, there stood alongside the pole a royal
+forest ranger in green, with a queer cockaded hat on his head, doing
+sentry duty.  As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a
+ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out
+of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us,
+not pears, but papers. Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few
+rods by soldiers begging for papers. Some had small wooden sign-boards
+bearing the word Zeitung, which they would lift and swing across the
+path of an approaching automobile.  I began to believe after a while
+that if a man had enough newspapers in stock he could bribe his way
+through the German troops clear into France.
+
+These fellows who gathered about us now were of the Landsturm, men in
+their late thirties and early forties, with long, shaggy mustaches.
+Their kind forms the handle of the mighty hammer whose steel nose is
+battering at France.  Every third one of them wore spectacles, showing
+that the back lines of the army are extensively addicted to the favorite
+Teutonic sport of being nearsighted.  Also, their coat sleeves
+invariably were too long for them, and hid their big hands almost to the
+knuckles.  This is a characteristic I have everywhere noted among the
+German privates.  If the French soldier's coat is over-lengthy in the
+skirt the German's is ultra-generous with cloth in the sleeves.  I saw
+that their hair was beginning to get shaggy, showing that they had been
+in the field some weeks, since every German soldier--officer and private
+alike--leaves the barracks so close-cropped that his skin shows pinky
+through the bristles.  Among them was one chap in blue sailor's garb,
+left behind doubtless when forty-five hundred naval reserves passed
+through three days before to work the big guns in front of Antwerp.
+
+We went on.  At first there was nothing to show we had entered Belgium
+except that the Prussian flag did not hang from a pole in front of every
+farmhouse, but only in front of every fourth house, say, or every fifth
+one.  Then came stretches of drenched fields, vacant except for big
+black ravens and nimble piebald magpies, which bickered among themselves
+in the neglected and matted grain; and then we swung round a curve in
+the rutted roadway and were in the town of Battice.
+
+No; we were not in the town of Battice.  We were where the town of
+Battice had been--where it stood six weeks ago.  It was famous then for
+its fat, rich cheeses and its green damson plums.  Now, and no doubt for
+years to come, it will be chiefly notable as having been the town where,
+it is said, Belgian civilians first fired on the German troops from
+roofs and windows, and where the Germans first inaugurated their
+ruthless system of reprisal on houses and people alike.
+
+Literally this town no longer existed.  It was a scrap-heap, if you
+like, but not a town.  Here had been a great trampling out of the grapes
+of wrath, and most sorrowful was the vintage that remained.
+
+It was a hard thing to level these Belgian houses absolutely, for they
+were mainly built of stone or of thick brick coated over with a hard
+cement.  So, generally, the walls stood, even in Battice; but always the
+roofs were gone, and the window openings were smudged cavities, through
+which you looked and saw square patches of the sky if your eyes inclined
+upward, or else blackened masses of ruination if you gazed straight in
+at the interiors.  Once in a while one had been thrown flat.  Probably
+big guns operated here. In such a case there was an avalanche of broken
+masonry cascading out into the roadway.
+
+Midway of the mile-long avenue of utter waste which we now traversed we
+came on a sort of small square.  Here was the yellow village church.  It
+lacked a spire and a cross, and the front door was gone, so we could see
+the wrecked altar and the splintered pews within.  Flanking the church
+there had been a communal hall, which was now shapeless, irredeemable
+wreckage.  A public well had stood in the open space between church and
+hall, with a design of stone pillars about it.  The open mouth of the
+well we could see was choked with foul debris; but a shell had struck
+squarely among the pillars and they fell inward like wigwam poles,
+forming a crazy apex.  I remember distinctly two other things: a picture
+of an elderly man with whiskers--one of those smudged atrocities that
+are called in the States crayon portraits--hanging undamaged on the
+naked wall of what had been an upper bedroom; and a wayside shrine of
+the sort so common in the Catholic countries of Europe.  A shell had hit
+it a glancing blow, so that the little china figure of the Blessed
+Virgin lay in bits behind the small barred opening of the shrine.
+
+Of living creatures there was none.  Heretofore, in all the blasted
+towns I had visited, there was some human life stirring.  One could
+count on seeing one of the old women who are so numerous in these
+Belgian hamlets--more numerous, I think, than anywhere else on earth.
+In my mind I had learned to associate such a sight with at least one old
+woman--an incredibly old woman, with a back bent like a measuring
+worm's, and a cap on her scanty hair, and a face crosshatched with a
+million wrinkles--who would be pottering about at the back of some half-
+ruined house or maybe squatting in a desolated doorway staring at us
+with her rheumy, puckered eyes.  Or else there would be a hunchback--
+crooked spines being almost as common in parts of Belgium as goiters are
+in parts of Switzerland.  But Battice had become an empty tomb, and was
+as lonely and as silent as a tomb.  Its people--those who survived--had
+fled from it as from an abomination.
+
+Beyond Battice stood another village, called Herve; and Herve was
+Battice all over again, with variations.  At this place, during the
+first few hours of actual hostilities between the little country and the
+big one, the Belgians had tried to stem the inpouring German flood, as
+was proved by wrecks of barricades in the high street.  One barricade
+had been built of wagon bodies and the big iron hods of road-scrapers;
+the wrecks of these were still piled at the road's edge.  Yet there
+remained tangible proof of the German claim that they did not harry and
+burn indiscriminately, except in cases where the attack on them was by
+general concert.
+
+Here and there, on the principal street, in a row of ruins, stood a
+single house that was intact and undamaged.  It was plain enough to be
+seen that pains had been taken to spare it from the common fate of its
+neighbors.  Also, I glimpsed one short side street that had come out of
+the fiery visitation whole and unscathed, proving, if it proved
+anything, that even in their red heat the Germans had picked and chosen
+the fruit for the wine press of their vengeance.
+
+After Herve we encountered no more destruction by wholesale, but only
+destruction by piecemeal, until, nearing Liege, we passed what remained
+of the most northerly of the ring of fortresses that formed the city's
+defenses.  The conquerors had dismantled it and thrown down the guns, so
+that of the fort proper there was nothing except a low earthen wall,
+almost like a natural ridge in the earth.
+
+All about it was an entanglement of barbed wire; the strands were woven
+and interwoven, tangled and twined together, until they suggested
+nothing so much as a great patch of blackberry briers after the leaves
+have dropped from the vines in the fall of the year.  To take the works
+the Germans had to cut through these trochas.  It seemed impossible to
+believe human beings could penetrate them, especially when one was told
+that the Belgians charged some of the wires with high electricity, so
+that those of the advancing party who touched them were frightfully
+burned and fell, with their garments blazing, into the jagged wire
+brambles, and were held there until they died.
+
+Before the charge and the final hand-to-hand fight, however, there was
+shelling.  There was much shelling.  Shells from the German guns that
+fell short or overshot the mark descended in the fields, and for a mile
+round these fields were plowed as though hundreds of plowshares had
+sheared the sod this way and that, until hardly a blade of grass was
+left to grow in its ordained place.  Where shells had burst after they
+struck were holes in the earth five or six feet across and five or six
+feet deep.  Shells from the German guns and from the Belgian guns had
+made a most hideous hash of a cluster of small cottages flanking a small
+smelting plant which stood directly in the line of fire. Some of these
+houses--workmen's homes, I suppose they had been--were of frame,
+sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you
+could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow,
+had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden
+ribs showing below.  The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely
+and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted. One
+house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken
+windows and fissures in the roof--as though the whizzing shells had
+spared it deliberately.
+
+I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of
+front wall between the places where windows had been.  It rose in a
+ragged column to the line of the roof-rafters--only, of course, there
+was neither roof nor rafter now.  On the face of the column, as though
+done in a spirit of bitter irony, was posted a proclamation, signed by
+the burgomaster and the military commandant, calling on the vanished
+dwellers of this place to preserve their tranquillity.
+
+On the side of the fort away from the city, and in the direction whence
+we had come, a corporal's guard had established itself in a rent-asunder
+house in order to be out of the wet.  On the front of the house they had
+hung a captured Belgian bugler's uniform and a French dragoon's
+overcoat, which latter garment was probably a trophy brought back from
+the lower lines of fighting; it made you think of an old-clothes-man's
+shop.  The corporal came forth to look at our passes before permitting
+us to go on.  He was a dumpy, good-natured-looking Hanoverian with
+patchy saffron whiskers sprouting out on him.
+
+"Ach! yes," he said in answer to my conductor's question.  "Things are
+quiet enough here now; but on Monday"--that would be three days before--
+"we shot sixteen men here--rioters and civilians who fired on our
+troops, and one grave-robber--a dirty hound! They are yonder."
+
+He swung his arm; and following its swing we saw a mound of fresh-turned
+clay, perhaps twenty feet in length, which made a yellow streak against
+the green of a small inclosed pasture about a hundred yards away.  We
+saw many such mounds that day; and this one where the ignoble sixteen
+lay was the shortest of the lot.  Some mounds were fifty or sixty feet
+in length.  I presume there were distinguishing marks on the filled-up
+trenches where the German dead lay, but from the automobile we could
+make out none.
+
+As we started on again, after giving the little Hanoverian the last
+treasured copy of a paper we had managed to keep that long against
+continual importunity, a big Belgian dog, with a dragging tail and a
+sharp jackal nose, loped round from behind an undamaged cow barn which
+stood back of the riven shell of a house where the soldiers were
+quartered.  He had the air about him of looking for somebody or
+something.
+
+He stopped short, sniffing and whining, at sight of the gray coats
+bunched in the doorway; and then, running back a few yards, with his
+head all the time turned to watch the strangers, he sat on his haunches,
+stuck his pointed muzzle upward toward the sky and fetched a long,
+homesick howl from the bottom of his disconsolate canine soul. When we
+turned a bend in the road, to enter the first recognizable street of
+Liege, he was still hunkered down there in the rain.  He finished the
+picture; he keynoted it.  The composition of it--for me--was perfect
+now.
+
+I mean no levity when I say that Liege was well shaken before taken; but
+merely that the phrase is the apt one for use, because it better
+expresses the truth than any other I can think of.  Yet, considering
+what it went through, last month, Liege seemed to have emerged in better
+shape than one would have expected.
+
+Driving into the town I saw more houses with white flags--the emblem of
+complete surrender--fluttering from sill and coping, than houses bearing
+marks of the siege.  In the bombardment the shells mostly appeared to
+have passed above the town--which was natural enough, seeing that the
+principal Belgian forts stood on the hilltops westward of and
+overlooking the city; and the principal German batteries--at least,
+until the last day of fighting--were posted behind temporary defenses,
+hastily thrown up, well to the east and north.
+
+Liege, squatted in the natural amphitheater below, practically escaped
+the fire of the big guns.  The main concern of the noncombatants, they
+tell me, was to shelter themselves from the street fighting, which, by
+all accounts, was both stubborn and sanguinary.  The doughty Walloons
+who live in this corner of Belgium have had the name of being sincere
+and willing workers with bare steel since the days when Charles the
+Bold, of Burgundy, sought to curb their rebellious spirits by razing
+their city walls and massacring some ten thousand of them.  And quite a
+spell before that, I believe, Julius Caesar found them tough to bend and
+hard to break.
+
+As for the Germans, checked as they had been in their rush on France by
+a foe whom they had regarded as too puny to count as a factor in the
+war, they sacrificed themselves by hundreds and thousands to win
+breathing space behind standing walls until their great seventeen-inch
+siege guns could be brought from Essen and mounted by the force of
+engineers who came for that purpose direct from the Krupp works.
+
+In that portion of the town lying west of the Meuse we counted perhaps
+ten houses that were leveled flat and perhaps twenty that were now but
+burnt-out, riddled hulls of houses, as empty and useless as so many
+shucked pea-pods.  Of the bridges spanning the river, the principal one,
+a handsome four-span structure of stone ornamented with stone figures of
+river gods, lay now in shattered fragments, choking the current, where
+the Belgians themselves had blown it apart.  One more bridge, or perhaps
+two--I cannot be sure--were closed to traffic because dynamite had made
+them unsafe; but the remaining bridges, of which I think there were
+three, showed no signs of rough treatment.  Opposite the great
+University there was a big, black, ragged scar to show where a block of
+dwellings had stood.
+
+Liege, to judge from its surface aspect, could not well have been
+quieter.  Business went on; buyers and sellers filled the side streets
+and dotted the long stone quays.  Old Flemish men fished industriously
+below the wrecked stone bridge, where the debris made new eddies in the
+swift, narrow stream; and blue pigeons swarmed in the plaza before the
+Palais de Justice, giving to the scene a suggestion of St. Mark's Square
+at Venice.
+
+The German Landwehr, who were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants
+civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against
+the Germans.  But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble
+was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us.  We talked
+with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been
+a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper.  He received us beneath the
+portico of the Theatre Royale, built after the model of the Odeon in
+Paris.  Two waspish rapid-fire guns stood just within the shelter of the
+columns, with their black snouts pointing this way and that to command
+the sweep of the three-cornered Place du Theatre.  A company of soldiers
+was quartered in the theater itself.  At night, so the lieutenant said,
+those men who were off duty rummaged the costumes out of the dressing
+rooms, put them on, and gave mock plays, with music.  An officer's horse
+occupied what I think must have been the box office.  It put its head
+out of a little window just over our heads and nickered when other
+horses passed.  Against the side of the building were posters
+advertising a French company to play the Gallicized version of an
+American farce--"Baby Mine"--by Margaret Mayo.  The borders of the
+posters were ornamented with prints of American flags done in the proper
+colors.
+
+"Yes, Liege seems quiet enough," said the lieutenant; "but we expect a
+revolt to break out at any time.  We expected it last night, and the
+guard in the streets was tripled and doubled; and these little dears"--
+patting the muzzle of one of the machine guns--"were put here; and more
+like them were mounted on the porticoes of the Hotel de Ville and the
+Palais de Justice.  So nothing happened in the city proper, though in
+the outskirts three soldiers disappeared and are supposed to have been
+murdered, and a high officer"--he did not give the name or the rank--
+"was waylaid and killed just beyond the environs.
+
+"Now we fear that the uprising may come to-night.  For the last three
+days the residents, in great numbers, have been asking for permits to
+leave Liege and go into neutral territory in Holland, or to other parts
+of their own country.  To us this sudden exodus--there seems to be no
+reason for it--looks significant.
+
+"These people are naturally turbulent.  Always they have been so.  Most
+of them are makers of parts for firearms--gunmaking, you know, was the
+principal industry here--and they are familiar with weapons; and many of
+the men are excellent shots.  This increases the danger.  At first they
+were content to ambush single soldiers who strayed into obscure quarters
+after dark.  Now it is forbidden for less than three soldiers in a party
+to go anywhere at night; and they think from this that we are afraid,
+and are growing more daring.
+
+"By day they smile at us and bow, and are as polite as dancing masters;
+but at night the same men who smile at us will cheerfully cut the throat
+of any German who is foolish enough to venture abroad alone.
+
+"Besides, this town and all the towns between here and Brussels are
+being secretly flooded with papers printed in French telling the people
+that we have been beaten everywhere to the south, and that the Allies
+are but a few miles away; and that if they will rise in numbers and
+destroy the garrisons re-enforcements will arrive the next morning to
+hold the district against us.
+
+"If they do rise it will be Louvain all over again.  We shall burn Liege
+and kill all who are suspected of being in league against our troops.
+Assuredly many innocent ones will suffer then with the guilty; but what
+else can we do? We are living above a seething volcano."
+
+Certainly, though, never did volcano seethe more quietly.
+
+The garrison commander would not hear of our visiting any of the wrecked
+Belgian fortresses on the wooded heights behind the city.  As a reason
+for his refusal he said that explosives in the buried magazines were
+beginning to go off, making it highly dangerous for spectators to
+venture near them.  However, he had no objection to our going to a
+certain specified point within the zone of supposed safety.  With a
+noncommissioned officer to guide us we climbed up a miry footpath to the
+crest of a low hill; and from a distance of perhaps a hundred yards we
+looked across at what was left of Fort Loncin, one of the principal
+defenses.
+
+I am wrong there.  We did not look at what was left of Fort Loncin.
+Literally nothing was left of it.  As a fort it was gone, obliterated,
+wiped out, vanished.  It had been of a triangular shape.  It was of no
+shape now.  We found it difficult to believe that the work of human
+hands had wrought destruction so utter and overwhelming.  Where masonry
+walls had been was a vast junk heap; where stout magazines had been
+bedded down in hard concrete was a crater; where strong barracks had
+stood was a jumbled, shuffled nothingness.
+
+Standing there on the shell-torn hilltop, looking across to where the
+Krupp surprise wrote its own testimonials at its first time of using, in
+characters so deadly and devastating, I found myself somehow thinking of
+that foolish nursery tale wherein it is recited that a pig built himself
+a house of straw, and the wolf came; and he huffed and he puffed and he
+blew the house down.  The noncommissioned officer told us an unknown
+number of the defenders, running probably into the hundreds, had been
+buried so deeply beneath the ruins of the fort in the last hours of the
+fighting that the Germans had been unable to recover the bodies.  Even
+as he spoke a puff of wind brought to our nostrils a smell which, once a
+man gets it into his nose, he will never get the memory of it out again
+so long as he has a nose.  Being sufficiently sick, we departed thence.
+
+As we rode back, and had got as far as the two ruined villages, it began
+to rain very hard.  The rain, as it splashed into the puddles, stippled
+the farther reaches of the road thickly with dots, and its slanting
+lines turned everything into one gray etching which you might have
+labeled Desolation! And you would make no mistake in your labeling.
+Then--with one of those tricks of deliberate drama by which Nature
+sometimes shames stage managers--the late afternoon sun came out just
+after we crossed the frontier, and shone on us; and on the dapper young
+officers driving out in carriages; and on the peaceful German country
+places with their formal gardens; and on a crate of fat white German
+pigs riding to market to be made up into sausages for the placid
+burghers of Aix-la-Chapelle.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 8
+
+Three Generals and a Cook
+
+
+To get to the civic midriff of the ancient and honorable French city of
+Laon you must ascend a road that winds in spirals about a high, steep
+hill, like threads cut in a screw. Doing this you come at length to the
+flat top of the screw--a most curiously flat top--and find on this side
+of you the Cathedral and the market-place, and on that side of you the
+Hotel de Ville, where a German flag hangs among the iron lilies in the
+grille-worked arms of the Republic above the front doors.  Dead ahead of
+you is the Prefecture, which is a noble stone building, facing southward
+toward the River Aisne; and it has decorations of the twentieth century,
+a gateway of the thirteenth century and plumbing of the third century,
+when there was no plumbing to speak of.
+
+We had made this journey and now the hour was seven in the evening, and
+we were dining in the big hall of the Prefecture as the guests of His
+Excellency, Field Marshal von Heeringen, commanding the Seventh Army of
+the German Kaiser--dining, I might add, from fine French plates, with
+smart German orderlies for waiters.
+
+Except us five, and one other, the twenty-odd who sat about the great
+oblong table were members of the Over-General's staff.  We five were
+Robert J.  Thompson, American consul at Aix-la-Chapelle; McCutcheon and
+Bennett, of the Chicago Tribune; Captain Alfred Mannesmann, of the
+great German manufacturing firm of Mannesmann Mulag; and myself.  The
+one other was a Berlin artist, by name Follbehr, who having the run of
+the army, was going out daily to do quick studies in water colors in the
+trenches and among the batteries.  He did them remarkably well, too,
+seeing that any minute a shell might come and spatter him all over his
+own drawing board.  All the rest, though, were generals and colonels and
+majors, and such--youngish men mostly.  Excluding our host I do not
+believe there was a man present who had passed fifty years of age; but
+the General was nearer eighty than fifty, being one of the veterans of
+the Franco-Prussian War, whom their Emperor had ordered out of desk jobs
+in the first days of August to shepherd his forces in the field.  At his
+call they came--Von Heeringen and Von Hindenberg and Von Zwehl, to
+mention three names that speedily became catchwords round the world--
+with their gray heads full of Prussian war tactics; and very soon their
+works had justified the act of their imperial master in choosing them
+for leadership, and now they had new medals at their throats and on
+their breasts to overlay the old medals they won back in 1870-71.
+
+Like many of the older officers of the German Army I met, Von Heeringen
+spoke no English, in which regard he was excessively unlike ninety per
+cent of the younger officers.  Among them it was an uncommon thing in my
+experience to find one who did not know at least a smattering of English
+and considerably more than a smattering of understandable French.  Even
+that marvelous organism, the German private soldier, was apt to astonish
+you at unexpected moments by answering in fair-enough English the
+questions you put to him in fractured and dislocated German.
+
+Not once or twice, but a hundred times during my cruising about in
+Belgium and Germany and France, I laboriously unloaded a string of
+crippled German nouns and broken-legged adjectives and unsocketed verbs
+on a hickory-looking sentry, only to have him reply to me in my own
+tongue.  It would come out then that he had been a waiter at a British
+seaside resort or a steward on a Hamburg-American liner; or, oftener
+still, that he had studied English at the public schools in his native
+town of Kiel, or Coblenz, or Dresden, or somewhere.
+
+The officers' English, as I said before, was nearly always ready and
+lubricant.  To one who spoke no French and not enough German to hurt
+him, this proficiency in language on the part of the German standing
+army was a precious boon.  The ordinary double-barreled dictionary of
+phrases had already disclosed itself as a most unsatisfying volume in
+which to put one's trust. It was wearing on the disposition to turn the
+leaves trying to find out how to ask somebody to pass the butter and
+find instead whole pages of parallel columns of translated sentences
+given over to such questions as "Where is the aunt of my stepfather's
+second cousin?"
+
+As a rule a man does not go to Europe in time of war to look up his
+relatives by marriage.  He may even have gone there to avoid them.  War
+is terrible enough without lugging in all the remote kinsfolk a fellow
+has.  How much easier, then, to throw oneself on the superior
+educational qualifications of the German military machine.  Somebody was
+sure to have a linguistic life net there, rigged and ready for you to
+drop into.
+
+It was so in this instance, as it has been so in many instances before
+and since.  The courteous gentlemen who sat at my right side and at my
+left spoke in German or French or English as the occasion suited, while
+old Von Heeringen boomed away in rumbling German phrases.  As I ate I
+studied him.
+
+Three weeks later, less a day, I met by appointment Lord Kitchener and
+spent forty minutes, or thereabouts, in his company at the War Office in
+London.  In the midst of the interview, as I sat facing Kitchener I
+began wondering, in the back part of my head, who it was Lord Kitchener
+reminded me of.  Suddenly the answer came to me, and it jolted me.  The
+answer was Von Heeringen.
+
+Physically the two men--Kitchener of Khartoum and Von Heeringen, the
+Gray Ghost of Metz--had nothing in common; mentally I conceived them to
+be unlike.  Except that both of them held the rank of field marshal, I
+could put my finger on no point of similarity, either in personality or
+in record, which these men shared between them.  It is true they both
+served in the war of 1870-71; but at the outset this parallel fell flat,
+too, because one had been a junior officer on the German side and the
+other a volunteer on the French side.  One was a Prussian in every
+outward aspect; the other was as British as it is possible for a Briton
+to be.  One had been at the head of the general staff of his country,
+and was now in the field in active service with a sword at his side.
+The other, having served his country in the field for many years, now
+sat intrenched behind a roll-top desk, directing the machinery of the
+War Office, with a pencil for a baton.  Kitchener was in his robust
+sixties, with a breast like a barrel; Von Heeringen was in his
+shrinking, drying-up seventies, and his broad shoulders had already
+begun to fold in on his ribs and his big black eyes to retreat deeper
+into his skull.  One was beaky-nosed, hatchet-headed, bearded; the other
+was broad-faced and shaggily mustached.  One had been famed for his
+accessibility; the other for his inaccessibility.
+
+So, because of these acutely dissimilar things, I marveled to myself
+that day in London why, when I looked at Kitchener, I should think of
+Von Heeringen.  In another minute, though, I knew why: Both men radiated
+the same quality of masterfulness; both of them physically typified
+competency; both of them looked on the world with the eyes of men who
+are born to have power and to hold dominion over lesser men.  Put either
+of these two in the rags of a beggar or the motley of a Pantaloon, and
+at a glance you would know him for a leader.  Considering that we were
+supposed to be at the front on this evening at Laon, the food was good,
+there being a soup, and the invariable veal on which a German buttresses
+the solid foundations of his dinner, a salad and fruit, red wine and
+white wine and brandy.  Also, there were flies amounting in numbers to a
+great multitude.  The talk, like the flies, went to and fro about the
+table; and always it was worth hearing, since it dealt largely with
+first-hand experiences in the very heart of the fighting.
+
+Yet I must add that not all the talk was talk of war.  In peaceful Aix-
+la-Chapelle, whence we had come, the people knew but one topic.  Here,
+on the forward frayed edge of the battle line, the men who had that day
+played their part in battle occasionally spoke of other things.  I
+recall there was a discussion between Captain von Theobald, of the
+Artillery, and Major Humplmayer, of the Automobile Corps, on the merits
+of a painting that filled one of the panels in the big, handsome,
+overdecorated hall.  The major won, which was natural enough, since, in
+time of peace, he was by way of being a collector of and dealer in art
+objects at Munich.  Somebody else mentioned big-game shooting.  For five
+minutes, then, or such a matter, the ways of big game and the ways of
+shooting it held the interest of half a dozen men at our curve of the
+table.
+
+In such an interlude as this the listener might almost have lulled
+himself into the fancy that, after all, there was no war; that these
+courteous, gray-coated, shoulder-strapped gentlemen were not at present
+engaged in the business of killing their fellowmen; that this building
+wherein we sat, with its florid velvet carpets underfoot and its
+too-heavy chandeliers overhead, was not the captured chateau of the
+governor of a French province; and that the deep-eyed, white-fleeced,
+bull-voiced old man who sat just opposite was not the commander of
+sundry hundreds of thousands of fighting men with guns in their hands,
+but surely was no more and no less than the elderly lord of the manor,
+who, having a fancy for regimentals, had put on his and had pinned some
+glittering baubles on his coat and then had invited a few of his friends
+and neighbors in for a simple dinner on this fine evening of the young
+autumn.
+
+Yet we knew that already the war had taken toll of nearly every man in
+uniform who was present about this board.  General von Heeringen's two
+sons, both desperately wounded, were lying in field hospitals--one in
+East Prussia, the other in northern France not many miles from where we
+were.  His second in command had two sons--his only two sons--killed in
+the same battle three weeks before.  When, a few minutes earlier, I had
+heard this I stared at him, curious to see what marks so hard a stroke
+would leave on a man.  I saw only a grave middle-aged gentleman, very
+attentive to the consul who sat beside him, and very polite to us all.
+
+Prince Scharmberg-Lippe, whom we had passed driving away from the
+Prefecture in his automobile as we drove to it in ours, was the last of
+four brothers.  The other three were killed in the first six weeks of
+fighting.  Our own companion, Captain Mannesmann, heard only the day
+before, when we stopped at Hirson--just over the border from Belgium--
+that his cousin had won the Iron Cross for conspicuous courage, and
+within three days more was to hear that this same cousin had been sniped
+from ambush during a night raid down the left wing.
+
+Nor had death been overly stingy to the members of the Staff itself.  We
+gathered as much from chance remarks.  And so, as it came to be eight
+o'clock, I caught myself watching certain vacant chairs at our table and
+at the two smaller tables in the next room with a strained curiosity.
+
+One by one the vacant chairs filled up.  At intervals the door behind me
+would open and an officer would clank in, dusted over with the sift of
+the French roads.  He would bow ceremoniously to his chief and then to
+the company generally, slip into an unoccupied chair, give an order over
+his shoulder to a soldier-waiter, and at once begin to eat his dinner
+with the air of a man who has earned it.  After a while there was but
+one place vacant at our table; it was next to me.  I could not keep my
+eyes away from it.  It got on my nerves--that little gap in the circle;
+that little space of white linen, bare of anything but two unfilled
+glasses.  To me it became as portentous as an unscrewed coffin lid.  No
+one else seemed to notice it.  Cigars had been passed round and the talk
+eddied casually back and forth with the twisty smoke wreaths.
+
+An orderly drew the empty chair back with a thump.  I think I jumped.  A
+slender man, whose uniform fitted him as though it had been his skin,
+was sitting down beside me. Unlike those who came before him, he had
+entered so quietly that I had not sensed his coming.  I heard the
+soldier call him Excellency; and I heard him tell the soldier not to
+give him any soup.  We swapped commonplaces, I telling him what my
+business there was; and for a little while he plied his knife and fork
+busily, making the heavy gold curb chain on his left wrist tinkle
+musically.
+
+"I'm rather glad they did not get me this afternoon," he said as though
+to make conversation with a stranger.  "This is first-rate veal--better
+than we usually have here."
+
+"Get you?" I said.  "Who wanted to get you?"
+
+"Our friends, the enemy," he answered.  "I was in one of our trenches
+rather well toward the front, and a shell or two struck just behind me.
+I think, from their sound, they were French shells."
+
+This debonair gentleman, as presently transpired, was Colonel von
+Scheller, for four years consul to the German Embassy at Washington,
+more lately minister for foreign affairs of the kingdom of Saxony, and
+now doing staff duty in the ordnance department here at the German
+center.  He had the sharp brown eyes of a courageous fox terrier, a
+mustache that turned up at the ends, and a most beautiful command of the
+English language and its American idioms.  He hurried along with his
+dinner and soon he had caught up with us.
+
+"I suggest," he said, "that we go out on the terrace to drink our
+coffee.  It is about time for the French to start their evening
+benediction, as we call it.  They usually quit firing their heavy guns
+just before dark, and usually begin again at eight and keep it up for an
+hour or two."
+
+So we two took our coffee cups and our cigars in our hands and went out
+through a side passage to the terrace, and sat on a little iron bench,
+where a shaft of light, from a window of the room we had just quit,
+showed a narrow streak of flowering plants beyond the bricked wall and a
+clump of red and yellow woodbine on a low wall.
+
+The rest lay in blackness; but I knew, from what I had seen before dusk
+came, that we must be somewhere near the middle of a broad terrace--a
+hanging garden rather--full of sundials and statues and flower beds,
+which overhung the southern face of the Hill of Laon, and from which, in
+daylight, a splendid view might be had of wooded slopes falling away
+into wide, flat valleys, and wide, flat valleys rising again to form
+more wooded slopes.  I knew, too, from what I remembered, that the
+plateau immediately beneath us was flyspecked with the roofs of small
+abandoned villages; and that the road which ran straight from the base
+of the heights toward the remote river was a-crawl with supply wagons
+and ammunition wagons going forward to the German batteries, seven miles
+away, and with scouts and messengers in automobiles and on motor cycles,
+and the day's toll of wounded in ambulances coming back from the front.
+
+We could not see them when we went to the parapet and looked downward
+into the black gulf below, but the rumbling of the wheels and the
+panting of the motors came up to us.  With these came, also, the remote
+music of those queer little trumpets carried by the soldiers who ride
+beside the drivers of German military automobiles; and this sounded as
+thinly and plaintively to our ears as the cries of sandpipers heard a
+long way off across a windy beach.
+
+We could hear something else too: the evening benediction had started.
+Now fast, now slow, like the beating of a feverish pulse, the guns
+sounded in faint throbs; and all along the horizon from southeast to
+southwest, and back again, ran flares and waves of a sullen red
+radiance.  The light flamed high at one instant--like fireworks--and at
+the next it died almost to a glow, as though a great bed of peat coals
+or a vast limekiln lay on the farthermost crest of the next chain of
+hills.  It was the first time I had ever seen artillery fire at night,
+though I had heard it often enough by then in France and in Belgium, and
+even in Germany; for when the wind blew out of the west we could hear in
+Aix-la-Chapelle the faint booming of the great cannons before Antwerp,
+days and nights on end.
+
+I do not know how long I stood and looked and listened.  Eventually I
+was aware that the courteous Von Scheller, standing at my elbow, was
+repeating something he had already stated at least once.
+
+"Those brighter flashes you see, apparently coming from below the other
+lights, are our guns," he was saying.  "They seem to be below the others
+because they are nearer to us.  Personally I don't think these evening
+volleys do very much damage," he went on as though vaguely regretful
+that the dole of death by night should be so scanty, "because it is
+impossible for the men in the outermost observation pits to see the
+effect of the shots; but we answer, as you notice, just to show the
+French and English we are not asleep."
+
+Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.
+When they were ended we went indoors.  Everybody was assembled in the
+long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smashing out
+marching songs on the piano.  The Berlin artist made an art gallery of
+the billiard table and was exhibiting the water-color sketches he had
+done that day--all very dashing and spirited in their treatment, though
+a bit splashy and scrambled-eggish as to the use of the pigments.
+
+A very young man, with the markings of a captain on shoulder and collar,
+came in and went up to General von Heeringen and showed him something--
+something that looked like a very large and rather ornamental steel coal
+scuttle which had suffered from a serious personal misunderstanding with
+an ax.  The elongated top of it, which had a fluted, rudder-like
+adornment, made you think of Siegfried's helmet in the opera; but the
+bottom, which was squashed out of shape, made you think of a total loss.
+
+When the general had finished looking at this object we all had a chance
+to finger it.  The young captain seemed quite proud of it and bore it
+off with him to the dining room.  It was what remained of a bomb, and
+had been loaded with slugs of lead and those iron cherries that are
+called shrapnel.  A French flyer had dropped it that afternoon with
+intent to destroy one of the German captive balloons and its operator.
+The young officer was the operator of the balloon in question.  It was
+his daily duty to go aloft, at the end of a steel tether, and bob about
+for seven hours at a stretch, studying the effects of the shell fire and
+telephoning down directions for the proper aiming of the guns.  He had
+been up seven hundred feet in the air that afternoon, with no place to
+go in case of accident, when the Frenchman came over and tried to hit
+him.  "It struck within a hundred meters of me," called back the young
+captain as he disappeared through the dining-room doorway.  "Made quite
+a noise and tore up the earth considerably."
+
+"He was lucky--the young Herr Captain," said Von Scheller--"luckier than
+his predecessor.  A fortnight ago one of the enemy's flyers struck one
+of our balloons with a bomb and the gas envelope exploded.  When the
+wreckage reached the earth there was nothing much left of the operator--
+poor fellow!--except the melted buttons on his coat.  There are very few
+safe jobs in this army, but being a captive-balloon observer is one of
+the least safe of them all."
+
+I had noted that the young captain wore in the second buttonhole of his
+tunic the black-and-white-striped ribbon and the black-and-white Maltese
+Cross; and now when I looked about me I saw that at least every third
+man of the present company likewise bore such a decoration.  I knew the
+Iron Cross was given to a man only for gallant conduct in time of war at
+the peril of his life.
+
+A desire to know a few details beset me.  Humplmayer, the scholarly art
+dealer, was at my side.  He had it too--the Iron Cross of the first
+class.
+
+"You won that lately?" I began, touching the ribbon.
+
+"Yes," he said; "only the other day I received it."
+
+"And for what, might I ask?" said I, pressing my advantage.
+
+"Oh," he said, "I've been out quite a bit in the night air lately.  You
+know we Germans are desperately afraid of night air."
+
+Later I learned--though not from Humplmayer--that he had for a period of
+weeks done scout work in an automobile in hostile territory; which meant
+that he rode in the darkness over the strange roads of an alien country,
+exposed every minute to the chances of ambuscade and barbed-wire
+mantraps and the like.  I judge he earned his bauble.
+
+I tried Von Theobald next--a lynx-faced, square-shouldered young man of
+the field guns.  To him I put the question: "What have you done, now, to
+merit the bestowal of the Cross?"
+
+"Well," he said--and his smile was born of embarrassment, I thought--
+"there was shooting once or twice, and I--well, I did not go away.  I
+remained."
+
+So after that I quit asking.  But it was borne in upon me that if these
+gold-braceletted, monocled, wasp-waisted exquisites could go jauntily
+forth for flirtations with death as afore-time I had seen them going,
+then also they could be marvelously modest touching on their own
+performances in the event of their surviving those most fatal
+blandishments.
+
+Pretty soon we told the Staff good night, according to the ritualistic
+Teutonic fashion, and took ourselves off to bed; for the next day was
+expected to be a full day, which it was indeed and verily.  In the
+hotels of the town, such as they were, officers were billeted, four to
+the room and two to the bed; but the commandant enthroned at the Hotel
+de Ville looked after our comfort.  He sent a soldier to nail a notice
+on the gate of one of the handsomest houses in Laon--a house whence the
+tenants had fled at the coming of the Germans--which notice gave warning
+to all whom it might concern that Captain Mannesmann, who carried the
+Kaiser's own pass, and four American Herren were, until further orders,
+domiciled there.  And the soldier tarried to clean our boots while we
+slept and bring us warm shaving water in the morning.
+
+Being thus provided for we tramped away through the empty winding
+streets to Number Five, Rue St. Cyr, which was a big, fine three-story
+mansion with its own garden and courtyard.  Arriving there we drew lots
+for bedrooms.  It fell to me to occupy one that evidently belonged to
+the master of the house.  He must have run away in a hurry.  His
+bathrobe still hung on a peg; his other pair of suspenders dangled over
+the footboard; and his shaving brush, with dried lather on it, was on
+the floor.  I stepped on it as I got into bed and hurt my foot.
+
+Goodness knows I was tired enough, but I lay awake a while thinking what
+changes in our journalistic fortunes thirty days had brought us.  Five
+weeks before, bearing dangerously dubious credentials, we had trailed
+afoot--a suspicious squad--at the tail of the German columns, liable to
+be halted and locked up any minute by any fingerling of a sublieutenant
+who might be so minded to so serve us.  In that stressful time a war
+correspondent was almost as popular, with the officialdom of the German
+army, as the Asiatic cholera would have been.  The privates were our
+best friends then. Just one month, to the hour and the night, after we
+slept on straw as quasi-prisoners and under an armed guard in a
+schoolhouse belonging to the Prince de Caraman-Chimay, at Beaumont, we
+dined with the commandant of a German garrison in the castle of another
+prince of the same name--the Prince de Chimay--at the town of Chimay,
+set among the timbered preserves of the ancient house of Chimay.  In
+Belgium, at the end of August, we fended and foraged for ourselves
+aboard a train of wounded and prisoners.
+
+In northern France, at the end of September, Prince Reuss, German
+minister to Persia, but serving temporarily in the Red Cross Corps, had
+bestirred himself to find lodgings for us.  And now, thanks to a newborn
+desire on the part of the Berlin War Office to let the press of America
+know something of the effects of their operations on the people of the
+invaded states, here we were, making free with a strange French
+gentleman's chateau and messing with an Over-General's Staff.  Lying
+there, in another man's bed, I felt like a burglar and I slept like an
+oyster--the oyster being, as naturalists know, a most sound sleeper.
+
+In the morning there was breakfast at the great table--the flies of the
+night before being still present--with General von Heeringen inquiring
+most earnestly as to how we had rested, and then going out to see to the
+day's killing.  Before doing so, however, he detailed the competent
+Captain von Theobald and the efficient Lieutenant Giebel to serve for
+the day as our guides while we studied briefly the workings of the
+German war machine in the actual theater of war.
+
+It was under their conductorship that about noon we aimed our
+automobiles for the spot where, in accordance with provisions worked out
+in advance, but until that moment unknown to us, we were to lunch with
+another general--Von Zwehl, of the reserves. We left the hill, where the
+town was, some four miles behind us, and when we had passed through two
+wrecked and silent villages and through three of those strips of park
+timber which Continentals call forests, we presently drew up and halted
+and dismounted where a thick fringe of undergrowth, following the line
+of an old and straggly thorn hedge, met the road at right angles on the
+comb of a small ridge commanding a view of the tablelands to the
+southward.
+
+As we climbed up the banks we were aware of certain shelters which were
+like overgrown rabbit hutches cunningly contrived of wattled faggots and
+straw sheaves plaited together.  They had tarpaulin interlinings and
+dug-out earthen floors covered over thickly with straw.  These cozy
+small shacks hid themselves behind a screen of haws among the scattered
+trees which flanked an ancient fortification, abandoned many years
+before, I judged, by the grass-grown looks of it.  Out in front, upon
+the open crest of the rise, staff officers were grouped about two
+telescopes mounted on tripods.  An old man--you could tell by the hunch
+of his shoulders he was old--sat on a camp chair with his back to us and
+his face against the barrels of one of the telescopes.  With his long
+dust-colored coat and the lacings of violent scarlet upon his cap and
+his upturned collar he made you think of one of those big gray African
+parrots that talk so fluently and bite so viciously.  But when, getting
+nimbly up, he turned to greet us and be introduced the resemblance
+vanished.
+
+There was nothing of the parrot about him now, Here was a man part watch
+dog and part hawk.  His cheeks and the flanges of his nostrils were
+thickly hair-lined with those little red-and-blue veins that are to be
+found in the texture of good American paper currency and in the faces of
+elderly men who have lived much out-of-doors during their lives.  His
+jowls were heavy and pendulous like a mastiff's.  His frontal bone came
+down low and straight so that under the flat arch of the brow his small,
+very bright agate-blue eyes looked out as from beneath half-closed
+shutters.  His hair was clipped close to his scalp and the shape of his
+skull showed, rounded and bulgy; not the skull of a thinker, nor yet the
+skull of a creator, just the skull of a natural-born fighting man.  The
+big, ridgy veins in the back of his neck stood out like window-cords
+from a close smocking of fine wrinkles.  The neck itself was tanned to a
+brickdust red.  A gnawed white mustache bristled on his upper lip.  He
+was tall without seeming to be tall and broad without appearing broad,
+and he was old enough for a grandfather and spry enough for his own
+grandchild.  You know the type.  Our Civil War produced it in number.
+
+At his throat was the blue star of the Order of Merit, the very highest
+honor a German soldier can win, and below it on his breast the
+inevitable black-and-white striped ribbon. The one meant leadership and
+the other testified to individual valor in the teeth of danger.  It was
+Excellency von Zwehl, commander of the Seventh Reserve Corps of the
+Western Army, the man who took Maubeuge from the French and English, and
+the man who in the same week held the imperiled German center against
+the French and English.
+
+We lunched with the General and his staff on soup and sausages, with a
+rare and precious Belgian melon cut in thin, salmon-tinted crescents to
+follow for dessert.  But before the lunch he took us and showed us,
+pointing this way and that with his little riding whip, the theater
+wherein he had done a thing which he valued more than the taking of a
+walled city.  Indeed there was a certain elemental boy-like bearing of
+pride in him as he told us the story.  If I am right in my dates the
+defenses of Maubeuge caved in under the batterings of the German Jack
+Johnsons on September sixth and the citadel surrendered September
+seventh.  On the following day, the eighth, Von Zwehl got word that a
+sudden forward thrust of the Allies threatened the German center at
+Laon.  Without waiting for orders he started to the relief.  He had
+available only nine thousand troops, all reserves.  As many more shortly
+re-enforced him.  He marched this small army--small, that is, as armies
+go these Titan times--for four days and three nights.  In the last
+twenty-four hours of marching the eighteen thousand covered more than
+forty English miles--in the rain.  They came on this same plateau, the
+one which we now faced, at six o'clock of the morning of September
+thirteenth, and within an hour were engaged against double or triple
+their number.  Von Zwehl held off the enemy until a strengthening force
+reached him, and then for three days, with his face to the river and his
+back to the hill, he fought.
+
+Out of a total force of forty thousand men he lost eight thousand and
+more in killed and wounded, but he saved the German Army from being
+split asunder between its shoulder-blades.  The enemy in proportion lost
+even more than he did, he thought.  The General had no English; he told
+us all this in German, Von Theobald standing handily by to translate for
+him when our own scanty acquaintance with the language left us puzzled.
+
+"We punished them well and they punished us well," he added.  "We
+captured a group of thirty-one Scotchmen--all who were left out of a
+battalion of six hundred and fifty, and there was no commissioned
+officer left of that battalion.  A sergeant surrendered them to my men.
+They fight very well against us--the Scotch."
+
+Since then the groundswell of battle had swept forward, then backward,
+until now, as chance would have it, General von Zwehl once more had his
+headquarters on the identical spot where he had them four weeks before
+during his struggle to keep the German center from being pierced.  Then
+it had been mainly infantry fighting at close range; now it was the
+labored pounding of heavy guns, the pushing ahead of trench-work
+preparatory to another pitched battle.
+
+Considering what had taken place here less than a month before the plain
+immediately before us seemed peaceful enough.
+
+Nature certainly works mighty fast to cover up what man at war does.
+True, the yellow-green meadowlands ahead of us were scuffed and scored
+minutely as though a myriad swine had rooted there for mast. The gouges
+of wheels and feet were at the roadside. Under the broken hedge-rows you
+saw a littering of weather-beaten French knapsacks and mired uniform
+coats, but that was all.  New grass was springing up in the hoof tracks,
+and in a pecking, puny sort of way an effort was being made by certain
+French peasants within sight to get back to work in their wasted truck
+patches.  Near at hand I counted three men and an old woman in the
+fields, bent over like worms.  On the crest above them stood this gray
+veteran of two invasions of their land, aiming with his riding whip. The
+whip, I believe, signifies dominion, and sometimes brute force.
+
+Beyond the tableland, and along the succession of gentle elevations
+which ringed it in to the south, the pounding of the field pieces went
+steadily on, while Von Zwehl lectured to us upon the congenial subject
+of what he here had done.  Out yonder a matter of three or four English
+miles from us the big ones were busy for a fact.  We could see the smoke
+clouds of each descending shell and the dust clouds of the explosion,
+and of course we could hear it.  It never stopped for an instant, never
+abated for so much as a minute.  It had been going on this way for
+weeks; it would surely go on this way for weeks yet to come.  But so far
+as we could discern the General paid it no heed--he nor any of his
+staff.  It was his business, but seemingly the business went well.
+
+It was late that afternoon when we met our third general, and this
+meeting was quite by chance.  Coming back from a spin down the lines we
+stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur,
+known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve
+or something.  A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who
+we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of
+the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced
+in due form to General d'Elsa, the head of the Twelfth Reserve Corps, it
+turned out.  Standing in a ceremonious ring, with filled glasses in our
+hands, about a table which bore a flary lamp and a bottle of bad native
+wine, we toasted him and he toasted us.
+
+He was younger by ten years, I should say, than either Von Heeringen or
+Von Zwehl; too young, I judged, to have got his training in the blood-
+and-iron school of Bismarck and Von Moltke of which the other two must
+have been brag-scholars.  Both of them, I think, were Prussians, but
+this general was a Saxon from the South.  Indeed, as I now recall, he
+said his home in peace times was in Dresden.  He seemed less simple of
+manner than they; they in turn lacked a certain flexibility and grace of
+bearing which were his.  But two things in common they all three had and
+radiated from them--a superb efficiency in the trade at which they
+worked and a superb confidence in the tools with which they did the
+work.  This was rather a small man, quick and supple in his movements.
+He had a limited command of English, and he appeared deeply desirous
+that we Americans should have a good opinion of the behavior of his
+troops and that we should say as much in what we wrote for our fellow
+Americans to read.
+
+Coming out of the house to reenter our automobile I saw, across the
+small square of the town, which by now was quite in darkness, the flare
+of a camp kitchen.  I wanted very much to examine one of these wheeled
+cook wagons at close range.  An officer--the same who had first
+approached us to examine our papers--accompanied me to explain its
+workings and to point out the various compartments where the coal was
+kept and the fuel, and the two big sunken pots where the stew was cooked
+and the coffee was brewed.  The thing proved to be cumbersome, which was
+German, but it was most complete in detail, and that, take it, was
+German too.  While the officer rattled the steel lids the cook himself
+stood rigidly alongside, with his fingers touching the seams of his
+trousers.  Seen by the glare of his own fire he seemed a clod, fit only
+to make soups and feed a fire box.  But by that same flickery light I
+saw something.  On the breast of his grease-spattered blouse dangled a
+black-and-white ribbon with a black-and-white Maltese cross fastened to
+it.  I marveled that a company cook should wear the Iron Cross of the
+second class and I asked the captain about it.  He laughed at the wonder
+that was evident in my tones.
+
+"If you will look more closely," he said, "you will see that a good many
+of our cooks already have won the Iron Cross since this war began, and a
+good many others will yet win it--if they live.  We have no braver men
+in our army than these fellows.  They go into the trenches at least
+twice a day, under the hottest fire sometimes, to carry hot coffee and
+hot food to the soldiers who fight.  A good many of them have already
+been killed.
+
+"Only the other day--at La Fere I think it was--two of our cooks at
+daybreak went so far forward with their wagon that they were almost
+inside the enemy's lines.  Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got
+separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and
+walked right into them.  The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its
+short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun,
+and they threw down their guns and surrendered.  The two cooks brought
+their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them
+stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast
+coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches.  They are good
+men, those cooks!"
+
+So at last I found out at second hand what one German soldier had done
+to merit the bestowal of the Iron Cross.  But as we came away, I was in
+doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it:
+I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of
+the German Army in this war--the general feeding his men by thousands
+into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the
+pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a
+coffee boiler in his hands--because it was an order.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 9
+
+Viewing A Battle from a Balloon
+
+
+She was anchored to earth in a good-sized field.  Woods horizoned the
+field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth.
+She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from
+tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter
+through her middle.  She was a bright yellow in color--a varnished,
+oily-looking yellow--and in shape suggestive of a frankfurter.
+
+At the end of her near the ground and on the side that was underneath
+--for she swung, you understand, at an angle--a swollen protuberance
+showed, as though an air bubble had got under the skin of the sausage
+during the packing and made a big blister.  She drooped weakly
+amidships, bending and swaying this way and that; and, as we came under
+her and looked up, we saw that the skin of the belly kept shrinking in
+and wrinkling up, in the unmistakable pangs of acute cramp colic.
+
+She had a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most
+flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was
+her normal appearance. Being in the business of spying she practiced
+deceit, with the deliberate intent of seeming to be what, emphatically,
+she was not.  She counterfeited chronic invalidism and she performed
+competently.
+
+She was an observation balloon of the pattern privily chosen by the
+German General Staff, before the beginning of the war, for the use of
+the German Signal Corps.  On this particular date and occasion she
+operated at a point of the highest strategic importance, that point
+being the center of the German battle lines along the River Aisne.
+
+She had been stationed here now for more than a week--that is to say,
+ever since her predecessor was destroyed in a ball of flaming fumes as a
+result of having a bomb flung through the flimsy cloth envelope by a
+coursing and accurate aviator of the enemy.  No doubt she would continue
+to be stationed here until some such mischance befell her too.
+
+On observation balloons, in time of war, no casualty insurance is
+available at any rate of premium.  I believe those who ride in them are
+also regarded as unsuitable risks.  This was highly interesting to hear
+and, for our journalistic purposes, very valuable to know; but, speaking
+personally, I may say that the thing which most nearly concerned me for
+the moment was this: I had just been invited to take a trip aloft in
+this wabbly great wienerwurst, with its painted silk cuticle and its
+gaseous vitals--and had, on impulse, accepted.
+
+I was informed at the time, and have since been reinformed more than
+once, that I am probably the only civilian spectator who has enjoyed
+such a privilege during the present European war.  Assuredly, to date
+and to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am the only civilian who
+has been so favored by the Germans.  Well, I trust I am not hoggish.
+Possessing, as it does, this air of uniqueness, the distinction is worth
+much to me personally.  I would not take anything for the experience;
+but I do not think I shall take it again, even if the chance should come
+my way, which very probably it will not.
+
+It was mid-afternoon; and all day, since early breakfast, we had been
+working our way in automobiles toward this destination.  Already my
+brain chambered more impressions, all jumbled together in a mass, than I
+could possibly hope to get sorted out and graded up and classified in a
+month of trying.  Yet, in a way, the day had been disappointing; for, as
+I may have set forth before, the nearer we came to the actual fighting,
+the closer in touch we got with the battle itself, the less we seemed to
+see of it.
+
+I take it this is true of nearly all battles fought under modern
+military principles.  Ten miles in the rear, or even twenty miles, is
+really a better place to be if you are seeking to fix in your mind a
+reasonably full picture of the scope and effect and consequences of the
+hideous thing called war.  Back there you see the new troops going in,
+girding themselves for the grapple as they go; you see the
+re-enforcements coming up; you see the supplies hurrying forward, and
+the spare guns and the extra equipment, and all the rest of it; you see,
+and can, after a dim fashion, grasp mentally, the thrusting, onward
+movement of this highly scientific and most unromantic industry which
+half the world began practicing in the fall of 1914.
+
+Finally, you see the finished fabrics of the trade coming back; and by
+that I mean the dribbling streams of the wounded and, in the fields and
+woods through which you pass, the dead, lying in windrows where they
+fell.  At the front you see only, for the main part, men engaged in the
+most tedious, the most exacting, and seemingly the most futile form of
+day labor--toiling in filth and foulness and a desperate driven haste,
+on a job that many of them will never live to see finished--if it is
+ever finished; working under taskmasters who spare them not--neither do
+they spare themselves; putting through a dreary contract, whereof the
+chief reward is weariness and the common coinage of payment is death
+outright or death lingering.  That is a battle in these days; that is
+war.
+
+So twistiwise was our route, and so rapidly did we pursue it after we
+left the place where we took lunch, that I confess I lost all sense of
+direction.  It seemed to me our general course was eastward; I
+discovered afterward it was southwesterly.  At any rate we eventually
+found ourselves in a road that wound between high grassy banks along a
+great natural terrace just below the level of the plateau in front of
+Laon.  We saw a few farmhouses, all desolated by shellfire and all
+deserted, and a succession of empty fields and patches of woodland.
+None of the natives were in sight.  Through fear of prying hostile eyes,
+the Germans had seen fit to clear them out of this immediate vicinity.
+Anyhow, a majority of them doubtlessly ran away when fighting first
+started here, three weeks earlier; the Germans had got rid of those who
+remained.  Likewise of troops there were very few to be seen.  We did
+meet one squad of Red Cross men, marching afoot through the dust. They
+were all fully armed, as is the way with the German field-hospital
+helpers; and, for all I know to the contrary, that may be the way with
+the field-hospital helpers of the Allies too.
+
+Though I have often seen it, the Cross on the sleeve-band of a man who
+bears a revolver in his belt, or a rifle on his arm, has always struck
+me as a most incongruous thing.  The noncommissioned officer in charge
+of the squad--chief orderly I suppose you might call him--held by
+leashes four Red Cross dogs.
+
+In Belgium, back in August, I had seen so-called dog batteries.  Going
+into Louvain on the day the Belgian Army, or what was left of it, fell
+back into Brussels, I passed a valley where many dogs were hitched to
+small machine guns; and I could not help wondering what would happen to
+the artillery formation, and what to the discipline of the pack, if a
+rabbit should choose that moment for darting across the battle front.
+
+These, however, were the first dogs I had found engaged in hospital-
+corps employment. They were big, wolfish-looking hounds, shaggy and
+sharp-nosed; and each of the four wore a collar of bells on his neck,
+and a cloth harness on his shoulders, with the red Maltese cross
+displayed on its top and sides.  Their business was to go to the place
+where fighting had taken place and search out the fallen.
+
+At this business they were reputed to be highly efficient.  The Germans
+had found them especially useful; for the German field uniform, which
+has the merit of merging into the natural background at a short
+distance, becomes, through that very protective coloration, a
+disadvantage when its wearer drops wounded and unconscious on the open
+field.  In a poor light the litter bearers might search within a few
+rods of him and never see him; but where the faulty eyesight fails the
+nose of the dog sniffs the human taint in the air, and the dog makes the
+work of rescue thorough and complete.  At least we were told so.
+
+Presently our automobile rounded a bend in the road, and the observation
+balloon, which until that moment we had been unable to glimpse, by
+reason of an intervening formation of ridges, revealed itself before us.
+The suddenness of its appearance was startling.  We did not see it until
+we were within a hundred yards of it.  At once we realized how perfect
+an abiding place this was for a thing which offered so fine and looming
+a target.
+
+Moreover, the balloon was most effectively guarded against attack at
+close range.  We became aware of that fact when we dismounted from the
+automobile and were clambering up the steep bank alongside.  Soldiers
+materialized from everywhere, like dusty specters, but fell back,
+saluting, when they saw that officers accompanied us.  On advice we had
+already thrown away our lighted cigars; but two noncommissioned officers
+felt it to be their bounden duty to warn us against striking matches in
+that neighborhood.  You dare not take chances with a woven bag that is
+packed with many hundred cubic feet of gas.
+
+At the moment of our arrival the balloon was drawn down so near the
+earth that its distorted bottommost extremity dipped and twisted slackly
+within fifty or sixty feet of the grass.
+
+The upper end, reaching much farther into the air, underwent convulsive
+writhings and contortions as an intermittent breeze came over the
+sheltering treetops and buffeted it in puffs.  Almost beneath the
+balloon six big draft horses stood, hitched in pairs to a stout wagon
+frame on which a huge wooden drum was mounted.
+
+Round this drum a wire cable was coiled, and a length of the cable
+stretched like a snake across the field to where it ended in a swivel,
+made fast to the bottom of the riding car.  It was not, strictly
+speaking, a riding car.  It was a straight-up-and-down basket of tough,
+light wicker, no larger and very little deeper than an ordinarily fair-
+sized hamper for soiled linen.  Indeed, that was what it reminded one
+of--a clothesbasket.
+
+Grouped about the team and the wagon were soldiers to the number of
+perhaps a third of a company.  Half a dozen of them stood about the
+basket holding it steady--or trying to.  Heavy sandbags hung pendent-
+wise about the upper rim of the basket, looking very much like so many
+canvased hams; but, even with these drags on it and in spite of the
+grips of the men on the guy ropes of its rigging, it bumped and bounded
+uneasily to the continual rocking of the gas bag above it.  Every moment
+or two it would lift itself a foot or so and tilt and jerk, and then
+come back again with a thump that made it shiver.
+
+Of furnishings the interior of the car contained nothing except a
+telephone, fixed against one side of it; a pair of field glasses, swung
+in a sort of harness; and a strip of tough canvas, looped across halfway
+down in it.  The operator, when wearied by standing, might sit astride
+this canvas saddle, with his legs cramped under him, while he spied out
+the land with his eyes, which would then be just above the top of his
+wicker nest, and while he spoke over the telephone.
+
+The wires of the telephone escaped through a hole under his feet and ran
+to a concealed station at the far side of the field which in turn
+communicated with the main exchange at headquarters three miles away;
+which in its turn radiated other wires to all quarters of the battle
+front.  Now the wires were neatly coiled on the ground beside the
+basket.  A sergeant stood over them to prevent any careless foot from
+stepping on the precious strands.  He guarded them as jealously as a hen
+guards her brood.
+
+The magazine containing retorts of specially prepared gas, for
+recharging the envelope when evaporation and leakage had reduced the
+volume below the lifting and floating point, was nowhere in sight.  It
+must have been somewhere near by, but we saw no signs of it.  Nor did
+our guides for the day offer to show us its whereabouts.  However,
+knowing what I do of the German system of doing things, I will venture
+the assertion that it was snugly hidden and stoutly protected.
+
+These details I had time to take in, when there came across the field to
+join us a tall young officer with a three weeks' growth of stubby black
+beard on his face.  A genial and captivating gentleman was Lieutenant
+Brinkner und Meiningen, and I enjoyed my meeting with him; and often
+since that day in my thoughts I have wished him well. However, I doubt
+whether he will be living by the time these lines see publication.
+
+It is an exciting life a balloon operator in the German Army lives, but
+it is not, as a rule, a long one.  Lieutenant Meiningen was successor to
+a man who was burned to death in mid-air a week before; and on the day
+before a French airman had dropped a bomb from the clouds that missed
+this same balloon by a margin of less than a hundred yards--close
+marksmanship, considering that the airman in question was seven or eight
+thousand feet aloft, and moving at the rate of a mile or so a minute
+when he made his cast.
+
+It was the Lieutenant who said he had authority to take one of our
+number up with him, and it was I who chanced to be nearest to the
+balloon when he extended the invitation. Some one--a friend--removed
+from between my teeth the unlighted cigar I held there, for fear I might
+forget and try to light it; and somebody else--a stranger to me--
+suggested that perhaps I was too heavy for a passenger.
+
+By that time, however, a kindly corporal had boosted me up over the rim
+of the basket and helped me to squeeze through the thick netting of guy
+lines; and there I was, standing inside that overgrown clotheshamper,
+which came up breast high on me--and Brinkner und Meiningen was swinging
+himself nimbly in beside me.  That basket was meant to hold but one man.
+It made a wondrously snug fit for two; the both of us being full-sized
+adults at that.  We stood back to back; and to address the other each
+must needs speak over his shoulder.  The canvas saddle was between us,
+dangling against the calves of our legs; and the telephone was in front
+of the lieutenant, where he could reach the transmitter with his lips by
+stooping a little.
+
+The soldiers began unhooking the sandbags; the sergeant who guarded the
+telephone wire took up a strand of it and held it loosely in his hands,
+ready to pay it out.  Under me I felt the basket heave gently.  Looking
+up I saw that the balloon was no longer a crooked sausage.  She had
+become a big, soft, yellow summer squash, with an attenuated neck. The
+flaccid abdomen flinched in and puffed out, and the snout wabbled to and
+fro.
+
+The lieutenant began telling me things in badly broken but painstaking
+English--such things, for example, as that the baglike protuberance just
+above our heads, at the bottom end of the envelope, contained air,
+which, being heavier than gas, served as a balance to hold her head up
+in the wind and keep her from folding in on herself; also, that it was
+his duty to remain aloft, at the end of his tether, as long as he could,
+meantime studying the effect of the German shell-fire on the enemy's
+position and telephoning down instructions for the better aiming of the
+guns--a job wherein the aeroplane scouts ably reenforced him, since they
+could range at will, whereas his position was comparatively fixed and
+stationary.
+
+Also I remember his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone,
+that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder
+straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to
+explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the
+Allies' lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I
+should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to
+explain.  "However," he added consolingly, "those are possibilities most
+remote.  The rope is not likely to break; and if it did we both should
+probably be dead before we ever reached the earth."
+
+That last statement sank deep into my consciousness; but I fear I did
+not hearken so attentively as I ought to the continuation of the
+lieutenant's conversation, because, right in the middle of his remarks,
+something had begun to happen.
+
+An officer had stepped up alongside to tell me that very shortly I
+should undoubtedly be quite seasick--or, rather, skysick--because of the
+pitching about of the basket when the balloon reached the end of the
+cable; and I was trying to listen to him with one ear and to my
+prospective traveling companion with the other when I suddenly realized
+that the officer's face was no longer on a level with mine.  It was
+several feet below mine.  No; it was not--it was several yards below
+mine.  Now he was looking up toward us, shouting out his words, with his
+hands funneled about his mouth for a speaking trumpet. And at every word
+he uttered he shrank into himself, growing shorter and shorter.
+
+It was not that we seemed to be moving.  We seemed to be standing
+perfectly still, without any motion of any sort except a tiny teetering
+motion of the hamper-basket, while the earth and what was on it fell
+rapidly away from beneath us.  At once all sense of perspective became
+distorted.
+
+When on the roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to
+me so great.  I imagine this is because the building remains stationary
+and a balloon moves.  Almost directly below us was one of our party,
+wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim.  It appeared to me that almost
+instantly his shoulders and body and legs vanished.  Nothing remained of
+him but his hat, which looked exactly like a thumb tack driven into a
+slightly tilted drawing board, the tilted drawing board being the field.
+The field seemed sloped now, instead of flat.
+
+Across the sunken road was another field.  Its owner, I presume, had
+started to turn it up for fall planting, when the armies came along and
+chased him away; so there remained a wide plowed strip, and on each side
+of it a narrower strip of unplowed earth.  Even as I peered downward at
+it, this field was transformed into a width of brown corduroy trimmed
+with green velvet.
+
+For a rudder we carried a long, flapping clothesline arrangement, like
+the tail of a kite, to the lower end of which were threaded seven
+yellow-silk devices suggesting inverted sunshades without handles.
+These things must have been spaced on the tail at equal distances apart,
+but as they rose from the earth and followed after us, whipping in the
+wind, the uppermost one became a big umbrella turned inside out; the
+second was half of a pumpkin; the third was a yellow soup plate; the
+fourth was a poppy bloom; and the remaining three were just amber beads
+of diminishing sizes.
+
+Probably it took longer, but if you asked me I should say that not more
+than two or three minutes had passed before the earth stopped slipping
+away and we fetched up with a profound and disconcerting jerk.  The
+balloon had reached the tip of her hitch line.
+
+She rocked and twisted and bent half double in the pangs of a fearful
+tummy-ache, and at every paroxysm the car lurched in sympathy, only to
+be brought up short by the pull of the taut cable; so that we two,
+wedged in together as we were, nevertheless jostled each other
+violently.  I am a poor sailor, both by instinct and training.  By
+rights and by precedents I should have been violently ill on the
+instant; but I did not have time to be ill.
+
+My fellow traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that
+to me--showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised
+just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted
+suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day--this October
+day was slightly hazy--we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the
+Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which
+the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the
+drum on the wagon a reverse motion, so that the cable was payed out
+evenly and regularly.  But I am afraid I did not listen closely.  My
+eyes were so busy that my ears loafed on the job.
+
+For once in my life--and doubtlessly only once--I saw now
+understandingly a battle front.
+
+It was spread before me--lines and dots and dashes on a big green and
+brown and yellow map.  Why, the whole thing was as plain as a chart.  I
+had a reserved seat for the biggest show on earth.
+
+To be sure it was a gallery seat, for the terrace from which we started
+stood fully five hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we had
+ascended approximately seven hundred feet above that, giving us an
+altitude of, say, twelve hundred feet in all above the level of the
+river; but a gallery seat suited me.  It suited me perfectly.  The great
+plateau, stretching from the high hill behind us, to the river in front
+of us, portrayed itself, when viewed from aloft, as a shallow bowl,
+alternately grooved by small depressions and corrugated by small ridges.
+Here and there were thin woodlands, looking exactly like scrubby
+clothesbrushes.  The fields were checkered squares and oblongs, and a
+ruined village in the distance seemed a jumbled handful of children's
+gray and red blocks.
+
+The German batteries appeared now to be directly beneath us--some of
+them, though in reality I imagine the nearest one must have been nearly
+a mile away on a bee line. They formed an irregular horseshoe, with the
+open end of it toward us.  There was a gap in the horseshoe where the
+calk should have been.  The German trenches, for the most part, lay
+inside the encircling lines of batteries.  In shape they rather
+suggested a U turned upside down; yet it was hard to ascribe to them any
+real shape, since they zigzagged so crazily.  I could tell, though,
+there was sanity in this seeming madness, for nearly every trench was
+joined at an acute angle with its neighbor; so that a man, or a body of
+men, starting at the rear, out of danger, might move to the very front
+of the fighting zone and all the time be well sheltered.  So far as I
+could make out there were but few breaks in the sequence of
+communications.  One of these breaks was almost directly in front of me
+as I stood facing the south.
+
+The batteries of the Allies and their infantry trenches, being so much
+farther away, were less plainly visible.  I could discern their location
+without being able to grasp their general arrangement.  Between the
+nearer infantry trenches of the two opposing forces were tiny dots in
+the ground, each defined by an infinitesimal hillock of yellow earth
+heaped before it--observation pits these, where certain picked men, who
+do not expect to live very long anyway, hide themselves away to keep
+tally on the effect of the shells, which go singing past just over their
+heads to fall among the enemy, who may be only a few hundred feet or a
+few hundred yards away from the observers.
+
+It was an excessively busy afternoon among the guns.  They spoke
+continually--now this battery going, now that; now two or three or a
+dozen together--and the sound of them came up to us in claps and roars
+like summer thunder.  Sometimes, when a battery close by let go, I could
+watch the thin, shreddy trail of fine smoke that marked the arched
+flight of a shrapnel bomb, almost from the very mouth of the gun clear
+to where it burst out into a fluffy white powder puff inside the enemy's
+position.
+
+Contrariwise, I could see how shells from the enemy crossed those shells
+in the air and curved downward to scatter their iron sprays among the
+Germans.  In the midst of all this would come a sharp, spattering sound,
+as though hail in the height of the thunder shower had fallen on a tin
+roof; and that, I learned, meant infantry firing in a trench somewhere.
+
+For a while I watched some German soldiers moving forward through a
+criss-cross of trenches; I took them to be fresh men going in to relieve
+other men who had seen a period of service under fire.  At first they
+suggested moles crawling through plow furrows; then, as they progressed
+onward, they shrank to the smallness of gray grub-worms, advancing one
+behind another.  My eye strayed beyond them a fair distance and fell on
+a row of tiny scarlet dots, like cochineal bugs, showing minutely but
+clearly against the green-yellow face of a ridgy field well inside the
+forward batteries of the French and English.  At that same instant the
+lieutenant must have seen the crawling red line too.  He pointed to it.
+
+"Frenchmen," he said; "French infantrymen's trousers.  One cannot make
+out their coats, but their red trousers show as they wriggle forward on
+their faces."
+
+Better than ever before I realized the idiocy of sending men to fight in
+garments that make vivid targets of them.
+
+My companion may have come up for pleasure, but if business obtruded
+itself on him he did not neglect it.  He bent to his telephone and spoke
+briskly into it.  He used German, but, after a fashion, I made out what
+he said.  He was directing the attention of somebody to the activities
+of those red trousers.
+
+I intended to see what would follow on this, but at this precise moment
+a sufficiently interesting occurrence came to pass at a place within
+much clearer eye range.  The gray grub-worms had shoved ahead until they
+were gray ants; and now all the ants concentrated into a swarm and,
+leaving the trenches, began to move in a slanting direction toward a
+patch of woods far over to our left.  Some of them, I think, got there,
+some of them did not.  Certain puff-balls of white smoke, and one big
+smudge of black smoke, which last signified a bomb of high explosives,
+broke over them and among them, hiding all from sight for a space of
+seconds.  Dust clouds succeeded the smoke; then the dust lifted slowly.
+Those ants were not to be seen.  They had altogether vanished.  It was
+as though an anteater had come forth invisibly and eaten them all up.
+
+Marveling at this phenomenon and unable to convince myself that I had
+seen men destroyed, and not insects, I turned my head south again to
+watch the red ladybugs in the field.  Lo! They were gone too! Either
+they had reached shelter or a painful thing had befallen them.
+
+The telephone spoke a brisk warning.  I think it made a clicking sound.
+I am sure it did not ring; but in any event it called attention to
+itself.  The other man clapped his ear to the receiver and took heed to
+the word that came up the dangling wire, and snapped back an answer.
+
+"I think we should return at once," he said to me over his shoulder.
+"Are you sufficiently wearied?"
+
+I was not sufficiently wearied--I wasn't wearied at all--but he was the
+captain of the ship and I was not even paying for my passage.
+
+The car jerked beneath our unsteady feet and heeled over, and I had the
+sensation of being in an elevator that has started downward suddenly,
+and at an angle to boot.  The balloon resisted the pressure from below.
+It curled up its tail like a fat bumblebee trying to sting itself, and
+the guy ropes, to which I held with both hands, snapped in imitation of
+the rigging of a sailboat in a fair breeze.  Plainly the balloon wished
+to remain where it was or go farther; but the pull of the cable was
+steady and hard, and the world began to rise up to meet us.  Nearing the
+earth it struck me that we were making a remarkably speedy return.  I
+craned my neck to get a view of what was directly beneath.
+
+The six-horse team was advancing toward us at a brisk canter and the
+drum turned fast, taking up the slack of the tether; but, as though not
+satisfied with this rate of progress, several soldiers were running back
+and jumping up to haul in the rope.  The sergeant who took care of the
+telephone was hard put to it to coil down the twin wires.  He skittered
+about over the grass with the liveliness of a cricket.
+
+Many soiled hands grasped the floor of our hamper and eased the jar of
+its contact with the earth.  Those same hands had redraped the rim with
+sandbags, and had helped us to clamber out from between the stay ropes,
+when up came the young captain who spelled the lieutenant as an aerial
+spy.  He came at a run.  Between the two of them ensued a sharp
+interchange of short German sentences.  I gathered the sense of what
+passed.
+
+"I don't see it now," said, in effect, my late traveling mate, staring
+skyward and turning his head.
+
+"Nor do I," answered the captain.  "I thought it was yonder." He flirted
+a thumb backward and upward over his shoulder.
+
+"Are you sure you saw it?"
+
+"No, not sure," said the captain.  "I called you down at the first
+alarm, and right after that it disappeared, I think; but I shall make
+sure."
+
+He snapped an order to the soldiers and vaulted nimbly into the basket.
+The horses turned about and moved off and the balloon rose.  As for the
+lieutenant, he spun round and ran toward the edge of the field, fumbling
+at his belt for his private field glasses as he ran.  Wondering what all
+this bother was about--though I had a vague idea regarding its meaning--
+I watched the ascent.
+
+I should say the bag had reached a height of five hundred feet when,
+behind me, a hundred yards or so away, a soldier shrieked out excitedly.
+Farther along another voice took up the outcry.  From every side of the
+field came shouts.  The field was ringed with clamor.  It dawned on me
+that this spot was even more efficiently guarded than I had conceived it
+to be.
+
+The driver of the wagon swung his lumbering team about with all the
+strength of his arms, and back again came the six horses, galloping now.
+So thickly massed were the men who snatched at the cable, and so eagerly
+did they grab for it, that the simile of a hot handball scrimmage
+flashed into my thoughts.  I will venture that balloon never did a
+faster homing job than it did then.
+
+Fifty men were pointing aloft now, all of them crying out as they
+pointed:
+
+"Flyer! French flyer !"
+
+I saw it.  It was a monoplane.  It had, I judged, just emerged from a
+cloudbank to the southward.  It was heading directly toward our field.
+It was high up--so high up that I felt momentarily amazed that all those
+Germans could distinguish it as a French flyer rather than as an English
+flyer at that distance.
+
+As I looked, and as all of us looked, the balloon basket hit the earth
+and was made fast; and in that same instant a cannon boomed somewhere
+well over to the right.  Even as someone who knew sang out to us that
+this was the balloon cannon in the German aviation field back of the
+town opening up, a tiny ball of smoke appeared against the sky,
+seemingly quite close to the darting flyer, and blossomed out with
+downy, dainty white petals, like a flower.
+
+The monoplane veered, wheeled and began to drive in a wriggling,
+twisting course.  The balloon cannon spoke again.  Four miles away, to
+the eastward, its fellow in another aviation camp let go, and the sound
+of its discharge came to us faintly but distinctly. Another smoke flower
+unfolded in the heavens, somewhat below the darting airship.
+
+Both guns were in action now.  Each fired at six-second intervals.  All
+about the flitting target the smokeballs burst--above it, below it, to
+this side of it and to that.  They polka-dotted the heavens in the area
+through which the Frenchman scudded.  They looked like a bed of white
+water lilies and he like a black dragonfly skimming among the lilies.
+It was a pretty sight and as thrilling a one as I have ever seen.
+
+I cannot analyze my emotions as I viewed the spectacle, let alone try to
+set them down on paper.  Alongside of this, big-game hunting was a
+commonplace thing, for this was big-game hunting of a magnificent kind,
+new to the world--revolving cannon, with a range of from seven to eight
+thousand feet, trying to bring down a human being out of the very
+clouds.
+
+He ran for his life.  Once I thought they had him.  A shell burst
+seemingly quite close to him, and his machine dipped far to one side and
+dropped through space at that angle for some hundreds of feet
+apparently.
+
+A yell of exultation rose from the watching Germans, who knew that an
+explosion close to an aeroplane is often sufficient, through the force
+of air concussion alone, to crumple the flimsy wings and bring it down,
+even though none of the flying shrapnel from the bursting bomb actually
+touch the operator or the machine.
+
+However, they whooped their joy too soon.  The flyer righted, rose,
+darted confusingly to the right, then to the left, and then bored
+straight into a woolly white cloudrack and was gone.  The moment it
+disappeared the two balloon cannon ceased firing; and I, taking stock of
+my own sensations, found myself quivering all over and quite hoarse.
+
+I must have done some yelling myself; but whether I rooted for the flyer
+to get away safely or for the cannon to hit him, I cannot for the life
+of me say.  I can only trust that I preserved my neutrality and rooted
+for both.
+
+Subsequently I decided in my own mind that from within the Allies' lines
+the Frenchman saw us--meaning the lieutenant and myself--in the air, and
+came forth with intent to bombard us from on high; that, seeing us
+descend, he hid in a cloud ambush, venturing out once more, with his
+purpose renewed, when the balloon reascended, bearing the captain.  I
+liked to entertain that idea, because it gave me a feeling of having
+shared to some degree in a big adventure.
+
+As for the captain and the lieutenant, they advanced no theories
+whatever.  The thing was all in the day's work to them.  It had happened
+before.  I have no doubt it has happened many times since.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 10
+
+In the Trenches Before Rheims
+
+
+After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of an
+anticlimax--was bound to be anti-climactic.  Yet the remainder of the
+afternoon was not without action.  Not an hour later, as we stood in a
+battery of small field guns--guns I had watched in operation from my
+lofty gallery seat--another flyer, or possibly the same one we had
+already seen, appeared in the sky, coming now in a long swinging sweep
+from the southwest, and making apparently for the very spot where our
+party had stationed itself to watch the trim little battery perform.
+
+It had already dropped some form of deadly souvenir we judged, for we
+saw a jet of black smoke go geysering up from a woodland where a German
+corps commander had his field headquarters, just after the airship
+passed over that particular patch of timber. As it swirled down the wind
+in our direction the vigilant balloon guns again got its range, and, to
+the throbbing tune of their twin boomings, it ducked and dodged away,
+executing irregular and hurried upward spirals until the cloud-fleece
+swallowed it up.
+
+The driver of that monoplane was a persistent chap.  I am inclined to
+believe he was the selfsame aviator who ventured well inside the German
+lines the following morning.  While at breakfast in the prefecture at
+Laon we heard the cannoneer-sharpshooters when they opened on him; and
+as we ran to the windows--we Americans, I mean, the German officers
+breakfasting with us remaining to finish their coffee--we saw a colonel,
+whom we had met the night before, sitting on a bench in the old
+prefecture flower garden and looking up into the skies through the
+glasses that every German officer, of whatsoever degree, carries with
+him at all times.
+
+He looked and looked; then he lowered his glasses and put them back into
+their case, and took up the book he had been reading.
+
+"He got away again," said the colonel regretfully, seeing us at the
+window.  "Plucky fellow, that! I hope we kill him soon.  The airmen say
+he is a Frenchman, but my guess is that he is English." And then he went
+on reading.
+
+Getting back to the afternoon before, I must add that it was not a bomb
+which the flying man threw into the edge of the woods.  He had a
+surprise for his German adversaries that day.  Soon after we left the
+stand of the field guns a civilian Red Cross man halted our machines to
+show us a new device for killing men.  It was a steel dart, of the
+length and thickness of a fountain pen, and of much the same aspect.  It
+was pointed like a needle at one end, and at the other was fashioned
+into a tiny rudder arrangement, the purpose of this being to hold it
+upright---point downward--as it descended.  It was an innocent-looking
+device--that dart; but it was deadlier than it seemed.
+
+"That flyer at whom our guns were firing a while ago dropped this,"
+explained the civilian. "He pitched out a bomb that must have contained
+hundreds of these darts; and the bomb was timed to explode a thousand or
+more feet above the earth and scatter the darts.  Some of them fell into
+a cavalry troop on the road leading to La Fere.
+
+"Hurt anyone? Ach, but yes! Hurt many and killed several--both men and
+horses.  One dart hit a trooper on top of his head.  It went through his
+helmet, through his skull, his brain, his neck, his body, his leg--all
+the way through him lengthwise it went.  It came out of his leg, split
+open his horse's flank, and stuck in the hard road.
+
+"I myself saw the man afterward.  He died so quickly that his hand still
+held his bridle rein after he fell from the saddle; and the horse
+dragged him--his corpse, rather--many feet before the fingers relaxed."
+
+The officers who were with us were tremendously interested--not
+interested, mind you, in the death of that trooper, spitted from the
+heavens by a steel pencil, but interested in the thing that had done the
+work.  It was the first dart they had seen.  Indeed, I think until then
+this weapon had not been used against the Germans in this particular
+area of the western theater of war.  These officers passed it about,
+fingering it in turn, and commenting on the design of it and the
+possibilities of its use.
+
+"Typically French," the senior of them said at length, handing it back
+to its owner, the Red Cross man--"a very clever idea too; but it might
+be bettered, I think." He pondered a moment, then added, with the racial
+complacence that belongs to a German military man when he considers
+military matters: "No doubt we shall adopt the notion; but we'll improve
+on the pattern and the method of discharging it.  The French usually
+lead the way in aerial inventions, but the Germans invariably perfect
+them."
+
+The day wound up and rounded out most fittingly with a trip eastward
+along the lines to the German siege investments in front of Rheims.  We
+ran for a while through damaged French hamlets, each with its soldier
+garrison to make up for the inhabitants who had fled; and then, a little
+later, through a less well-populated district.  In the fields, for long
+stretches, nothing stirred except pheasants, feeding on the neglected
+grain, and big, noisy magpies.  The roads were empty, too, except that
+there were wrecked shells of automobiles and bloated carcasses of dead
+troop horses.  When the Germans, in their campaigning, smash up an
+automobile--and traveling at the rate they do there must be many
+smashed--they capsize it at the roadside, strip it of its tires, draw
+off the precious gasoline, pour oil over it and touch a match to it.
+What remains offers no salvage to friend, or enemy either.
+
+The horses rot where they drop unless the country people choose to put
+the bodies underground.  We counted the charred cadavers of fifteen
+automobiles and twice as many dead horses during that ride.  The smell
+of horseflesh spoiled the good air.  When passing through a wood the
+smell was always heavier.  We hoped it was only dead horses we smelled
+there.
+
+When there has been fighting in France or Belgium, almost any thicket
+will give up hideous grisly secrets to the man who goes searching there.
+Men sorely wounded in the open share one trait at least with the lower
+animals.  The dying creature--whether man or beast--dreads to lie and
+die in the naked field.  It drags itself in among the trees if it has
+the strength.
+
+I believe every woodland in northern France was a poison place, and
+remained so until the freezing of winter sealed up its abominations
+under ice and frost.
+
+Nearing Rheims we turned into a splendid straight highway bordered by
+trees, where the late afternoon sunlight filtered through the dead
+leaves, which still hung from the boughs and dappled the yellow road
+with black splotches, until it made you think of jaguar pelts. Midway of
+our course here we met troops moving toward us in force.  First, as
+usual, came scouts on bicycles and motorcycles.  One young chap had
+woven sheaves of dahlias and red peonies into the frame of his wheel,
+and through the clump of quivering blossoms the barrel of his rifle
+showed, like a black snake in a bouquet.  He told us that troops were
+coming behind, going to the extreme right wing--a good many thousands of
+troops, he thought.  Ordinarily Uhlans would have followed behind the
+bicycle men, but this time a regiment of Brunswick Hussars formed the
+advance guard, riding four abreast and making a fine show, what with
+their laced gray jackets and their lanes of nodding lances, and their
+tall woolly busbies, each with its grinning brass death's-head set into
+the front of it.
+
+There was a blithe young officer who insisted on wheeling out of the
+line and halting us, and passing the time of day with us.  I imagine he
+wanted to exercise his small stock of English words.  Well, it needed
+the exercise.  The skull-and-bones poison label on his cap made a
+wondrous contrast with the smiling eyes and the long, humorous,
+wrinkled-up nose below it.
+
+"A miserable country," he said, with a sweep of his arm which
+comprehended all Northwestern Europe, from the German border to the sea
+--"so little there is to eat! My belly--she is mostly empty always.  But
+on the yesterday I have the much great fortune. I buy me a swine--what
+you call him?--a pork? Ah, yes; a pig.  I buy me a pig.  He is a living
+pig; very noisy, as you say--very loud.  I bring him twenty kilometers
+in an automobile, and all the time he struggle to be free; and he cry
+out all the time.  It is very droll--not?--me and the living pig, which
+ride, both together, twenty kilometers!"
+
+We took some letters from him to his mother and sweetheart, to be mailed
+when we got back on German soil; and he spurred on, beaming back at us
+and waving his free hand over his head.
+
+For half an hour or so, we, traveling rapidly, passed the column, which
+was made up of cavalry, artillery and baggage trains.  I suppose the
+infantry was going by another road. The dragoons sang German marching
+songs as they rode by, but the artillerymen were dour and silent lot for
+the most part.  Repeatedly I noticed that the men who worked the big
+German guns were rarely so cheerful as the men who belonged to the other
+wings of the service; certainly it was true in this instance.
+
+We halted two miles north of Rheims in the front line of the German
+works.  Here was a little shattered village; its name, I believe, was
+Brimont.  And here, also, commanding the road, stood a ruined fortress
+of an obsolete last-century pattern.  Shellfire had battered it into a
+gruel of shattered red masonry; but German officers were camped within
+its more habitable parts, and light guns were mounted in the moat.
+
+The trees thereabout had been mowed down by the French artillery from
+within the city, so that the highway was littered with their tops.
+Also, the explosives had dug big gouges in the earth.  Wherever you
+looked you saw that the soil was full of small, raggedy craters.
+Shrapnel was dropping intermittently in the vicinity; therefore we left
+our cars behind the shelter of the ancient fort and proceeded cautiously
+afoot until we reached the frontmost trenches.
+
+Evidently the Germans counted on staying there a good while.  The men
+had dug out caves in the walls of the trenches, bedding them with straw
+and fitting them with doors taken from the wreckage of the houses of the
+village.  We inspected one of these shelters.  It had earthen walls and
+a sod roof, fairly water-tight, and a green window shutter to rest
+against the entrance for a windbreak.  Six men slept here, and the wag
+of the squad had taken chalk and lettered the words "Kaiserhof Cafe" on
+the shutter.
+
+The trenches were from seven to eight feet deep; but by climbing up into
+the little scarps of the sharpshooters and resting our elbows in niches
+in the earth, meantime keeping our heads down to escape the attentions
+of certain Frenchmen who were reported to be in a wood half a mile away,
+we could, with the aid of our glasses, make out the buildings in Rheims,
+some of which were then on fire--particularly the great Cathedral.
+
+Viewed from that distance it did not appear to be badly damaged.  One of
+the towers had apparently been shorn away and the roof of the nave was
+burned--we could tell that. We were too far away of course to judge of
+the injury to the carvings and to the great rose window.
+
+Already during that week, from many sources, we had heard the Germans'
+version of the shelling of Rheims Cathedral, their claim being that they
+purposely spared the pile from the bombardment until they found the
+defenders had signal men in the towers; that twice they sent officers,
+under flags of truce, to urge the French to withdraw their signalers;
+and only fired on the building when both these warnings had been
+disregarded, ceasing to fire as soon as they had driven the enemy from
+the towers.
+
+I do not vouch for this story; but we heard it very frequently.  Now,
+from one of the young officers who had escorted us into the trench, we
+were hearing it all over again, with elaborations, when a shrapnel shell
+from the town dropped and burst not far behind us, and rifle bullets
+began to plump into the earthen bank a little to the right of us; so we
+promptly went away from there.
+
+We were noncombatants and nowise concerned in the existing controversy;
+but we remembered the plaintive words of the Chinese Minister at
+Brussels when he called on our Minister--Brand Whitlock--to ascertain
+what Whitlock would advise doing in case the advancing Germans fired on
+the city.  Whitlock suggested to his Oriental brother that he retire to
+his official residence and hoist the flag of his country over it,
+thereby making it neutral and protected territory.
+
+"But, Mister Whitlock," murmured the puzzled Chinaman, "the cannon--he
+has no eyes!"
+
+We rode back to Laon through the falling dusk.  The western sky was all
+a deep saffron pink--the color of a salmon's belly--and we could hear
+the constant blaspheming of the big siege guns, taking up the evening
+cannonade along the center.  Pretty soon we caught up with the column
+that was headed for the right wing.  At that hour it was still in
+motion, which probably meant forced marching for an indefinite time.
+Viewed against the sunset yellow, the figures of the dragoons stood up
+black and clean, as conventionalized and regular as though they had all
+been stenciled on that background.  Seeing next the round, spiked
+helmets of the cannoneers outlined in that weird half-light, I knew of
+what those bobbing heads reminded me.  They were like pictures of Roman
+centurions.
+
+Within a few minutes the afterglow lost its yellowish tone and burned as
+a deep red flare. As we swung off into a side road the columns were
+headed right into that redness, and turning to black cinder-shapes as
+they rode.  It was as though they marched into a fiery furnace, treading
+the crimson paths of glory--which are not glorious and probably never
+were, but which lead most unerringly to the grave.
+
+A week later, when we learned what had happened on the right wing, and
+of how the Germans had fared there under the battering of the Allies,
+the thought of that open furnace door came back to me.  I think of it
+yet-often.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 11
+
+War de Luxe
+
+
+"I think," said a colonel of the ordnance department as we came out into
+the open after a good but a hurried and fly-ridden breakfast--"I think,"
+he said in his excellent Saxonized English, "that it would be as well to
+look at our telephone exchange first of all. It perhaps might prove of
+some small interest to you."  With that he led the way through a jumble
+of corridors to a far corner of the Prefecture of Laon, perching high on
+the Hill of Laon and forming for the moment the keystone of the arch of
+the German center.  So that was how the most crowded day in a reasonably
+well-crowded newspaperman's life began for me--with a visit to a room
+which had in other days been somebody's reception parlor.  We came upon
+twelve soldier-operators sitting before portable switchboards with metal
+transmitters clamped upon their heads, giving and taking messages to and
+from all the corners and crannies of the mid-battle-front.  This little
+room was the solar plexus of the army.  To it all the tingling nerves of
+the mighty organism ran and in it all the ganglia centered.  At two
+sides of the room the walls were laced with silk-covered wires appliqued
+as thickly and as closely and as intricately as the threads in old point
+lace, and over these wires the gray-coated operators could talk--and did
+talk pretty constantly--with all the trenches and all the batteries and
+all the supply camps and with the generals of brigades and of divisions
+and of corps.
+
+One wire ran upstairs to the Over-General's sleeping quarters and ended,
+so we were told, in a receiver that hung upon the headboard of his bed.
+Another stretched, by relay points, to Berlin, and still another ran to
+the headquarters of the General Staff where the Kaiser was, somewhere
+down the right wing; and so on and so forth.  If war is a business these
+times instead of a chivalric calling, then surely this was the main
+office and clearing house of the business.
+
+To our novice eyes the wires seemed snarled--snarled inextricably,
+hopelessly, eternally--and we said as much, but the ordnance colonel
+said behind this apparent disorder a most careful and particular
+orderliness was hidden away.  Given an hour's notice, these busy men who
+wore those steel vises clamped upon their ears could disconnect the
+lines, pull down and reel in the wires, pack the batteries and the
+exchanges, and have the entire outfit loaded upon automobiles for speedy
+transmission elsewhere.  Having seen what I had seen of the German
+military system, I could not find it in my heart to doubt this.
+Miracles had already become commonplaces; what might have been epic once
+was incidental now.  I hearkened and believed.
+
+At his command a sergeant plugged in certain stops upon a keyboard and
+then when the Colonel, taking a hand telephone up from a table, had
+talked into it in German he passed it into my hands.
+
+"The captain at the other end of the line knows English," he said.
+"I've just told him you wish to speak with him for a minute." I pressed
+the rubber disk to my ear.  "Hello!" I said.
+
+"Hello!" came back the thin-strained answer.  "This is such and such a
+trench"--giving the number--"in front of Cerny.  What do you want to
+know?"
+
+"What's the news there?" I stammered fatuously.
+
+A pleasant little laugh tinkled through the strainer.
+
+"Oh, it's fairly quiet now," said the voice.  "Yesterday afternoon
+shrapnel fire rather mussed us up, but to-day nothing has happened.
+We're just lying quiet and enjoying the fine weather.  We've had much
+rain lately and my men are enjoying the change."
+
+So that was all the talk I had with a man who had for weeks been living
+in a hole in the ground with a ditch for an exercise ground and the
+brilliant prospects of a violent death for his hourly and daily
+entertainment.  Afterward when it was too late I thought of a number of
+leading questions which I should have put to that captain.  Undoubtedly
+there was a good story in him could you get it out.
+
+We came through a courtyard at the north side of the building, and the
+courtyard was crowded with automobiles of all the known European sizes
+and patterns and shapes--automobiles for scout duty, with saw-edged
+steel prows curving up over the drivers' seats to catch and cut dangling
+wires; automobiles fitted as traveling pharmacies and needing only red-
+and-green lights to be regular prescription drug stores; automobile-
+ambulances rigged with stretchers and first-aid kits; automobiles for
+carrying ammunition and capable of moving at tremendous speed for
+tremendous distances; automobile machine guns or machine-gun
+automobiles, just as suits you; automobile cannon; and an automobile
+mail wagon, all holed inside, like honeycomb, with two field-postmen
+standing up in it, back to back, sorting out the contents of snugly
+packed pouches; and every third letter was not a letter, strictly
+speaking, at all, but a small flat parcel containing chocolate or cigars
+or handkerchiefs or socks or even light sweaters--such gifts as might be
+sent to the soldiers, stamp-free, from any part of the German Empire.  I
+wonder how men managed to wage war in the days before the automobile.
+
+Two waiting cars received our party and our guides and our drivers, and
+we went corkscrewing down the hill, traversing crooked ways that were
+astonishingly full of German soldiers and astonishingly free of French
+townspeople.  Either the citizens kept to their closed-up houses or,
+having run away at the coming of the enemy, they had not yet dared to
+return, although so far as I might tell there was no danger of their
+being mistreated by the gray-backs.  Reaching the plain which is below
+the city we streaked westward, our destination being the field wireless
+station.
+
+Nothing happened on the way except that we overtook a file of slightly
+wounded prisoners who, having been treated at the front, were now bound
+for a prison in a convent yard, where they would stay until a train
+carried them off to Munster or Dusseldorf for confinement until the
+end of the war.  I counted them.--two English Tommies, two French
+officers, one lone Belgian--how he got that far down into France nobody
+could guess--and twenty-eight French cannoneers and infantrymen,
+including some North Africans.  Every man Jack of them was bandaged
+either about the head or about the arms, or else he favored an injured
+leg as he hobbled slowly on.  Eight guards were nursing them along;
+their bayonets were socketed in their carbine barrels.  No doubt the
+magazines of the carbines were packed with those neat brass capsules
+which carry doses of potential death; but the guards, except for the
+moral effect of the thing, might just as well have been bare-handed.
+None of the prisoners could have run away even had he been so minded.
+The poor devils were almost past walking, let alone running.  They
+wouldn't even look up as we went by them.
+
+The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his
+belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger
+who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher
+dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is
+gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas.  Modern military science has
+wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of
+the old game of war.  Bands no longer play the forces into the fight--
+indeed I have seen no more bands afield with the dun-colored files of
+the Germans than I might count on the fingers of my two hands; and
+flags, except on rare show-off occasions, do not float above the heads
+of the columns; and officers dress as nearly as possible like common
+soldiers; and the courier's work is done with much less glamour but with
+in-, finitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone, and by
+the aeroplane man, and most of all by the air currents of the wireless
+equipment.  We missed the gallant courier, but then the wireless was
+worth seeing too.
+
+It stood in a trampled turnip field not very far beyond the ruined Porte
+St. Martin at the end of the Rue St. Martin, and before we came to it we
+passed the Monument des Instituteurs, erected in 1899--as the
+inscription upon it told us--by a grateful populace to the memory of
+three school teachers of Laon who, for having raised a revolt of
+students and civilians against the invader in the Franco-Prussian War,
+were taken and bound and shot against a wall, in accordance with the
+system of dealing with ununiformed enemies which the Germans developed
+hereabouts in 1870 and perfected hereabouts in 1914.  A faded wreath,
+which evidently was weeks old, lay at the bronze feet of the three
+figures.  But the institute behind the monument was an institute no
+longer.  It had become, over night as it were, a lazaret for the
+wounded.  Above its doors the Red Cross flag and the German flag were
+crossed--emblems of present uses and present proprietorship.  Also many
+convalescent German soldiers sunned themselves upon the railing about
+the statue.  They seemed entirely at home.  When the Germans take a town
+they mark it with their own mark, as cattlemen in Texas used to mark a
+captured maverick; after which to all intents it becomes German.  We
+halted a moment here.
+
+"That's French enough for you," said the young officer who was riding
+with us, turning in his seat to speak--"putting up a monument to glorify
+three francs-tireurs.  In Germany the people would not be allowed to do
+such a thing.  But it is not humanly conceivable that they would have
+such a wish.  We revere soldiers who die for the Fatherland, not men who
+refuse to enlist when the call comes and yet take up arms to make a
+guerrilla warfare."
+
+Which remark, considering the circumstances and other things, was
+sufficiently typical for all purposes, as I thought at the time and
+still think.  You see I had come to the place where I could understand a
+German soldier's national and racial point of view, though I doubt his
+ability ever of understanding mine.  To him, now, old John Burns of
+Gettysburg, going out in his high, high hat and his long, long coat to
+fight with the boys would never, could never be the heroic figure which
+he is in the American imagination; he would have been a meddlesome
+malefactor deserving of immediate death.  For 1778 write it 1914, and
+Molly Pitcher serving at the guns would have been in no better case
+before a German court-martial.  I doubt whether a Prussian Stonewall
+Jackson would give orders to kill a French Barbara Frietchie, but
+assuredly he would lock that venturesome old person up in a fortress
+where she could not hoist her country's flag nor invite anybody to shoot
+her gray head.  For you must know that the German who ordinarily brims
+over with that emotion which, lacking a better name for it, we call
+sentiment, drains all the sentiment out of his soul when he takes his
+gun in his hand and goes to war.
+
+Among the frowzy turnip tops two big dull gray automobiles were
+stranded, like large hulks in a small green sea.  Alongside them a
+devil's darning-needle of a wireless mast stuck up, one hundred and odd
+feet, toward the sky.  It was stayed with many steel guy ropes, like the
+center pole of a circus top.  It was of the collapsible model and might
+therefore be telescoped into itself and taken down in twenty minutes, so
+we were informed pride-fully by the captain in charge; and from its
+needle-pointed tip the messages caught out of the ether came down by
+wire conductors to the interior of one of the stalled automobiles and
+there were noted down and, whenever possible, translated by two soldier-
+operators, who perched on wooden stools among batteries and things, for
+which I know not the technical names.  The spitty snarl of the apparatus
+filled the air for rods roundabout.  It made you think of a million
+gritty slate pencils squeaking over a million slates all together.  We
+were permitted to take up the receivers and listen to a faint scratching
+sound which must have come from a long way off.
+
+Indeed the officer told us that it was a message from the enemy that we
+heard.
+
+"Our men just picked it up," he explained; "we think it must come from a
+French wireless station across the river.  Naturally we cannot
+understand it, any more than they can understand our messages--they're
+all in code, you know.  Every day or two we change our code, and I
+presume they do too."
+
+Two of our party had unshipped their cameras by now, for the pass which
+we carried entitled us, among other important things, to commandeer that
+precious fluid, gasoline, whenever needed, and to take photographs; but
+we were asked to make no shapshots here.  We gathered that there were
+certain reasons not unconnected with secret military usage why we might
+not take away with us plates bearing pictures of the field wireless. In
+the main, though, remarkably few restrictions were laid upon us that
+day.  Once or twice, very casually, somebody asked us to refrain from
+writing about this thing or that thing which we had seen; but that was
+all.
+
+In a corner of the turnip field close up to the road were mounds of
+fresh-turned clay, and so many of them were there and so closely were
+they spaced and for so considerable a distance did they stretch along,
+they made two long yellow ribs above the herbage.  At close intervals
+small wooden crosses were stuck up in the rounded combs of earth so that
+the crosses formed a sort of irregular fence.  A squad of soldiers were
+digging more holes in the tough earth.  Their shovel blades flashed in
+the sunlight and the clods flew up in showers.
+
+"We have many buried over there," said an artillery captain, seeing that
+I watched the grave diggers, "a general among them and other officers.
+It is there we bury those who die in the Institute hospital.  Every day
+more die, and so each morning trenches are made ready for those who will
+die during that day.  A good friend of mine is over there; he was buried
+day before yesterday.  I sat up late last night writing to his wife--or
+perhaps I should say his widow.  They had been married only a few weeks
+when the call came.  It will be very hard on her."
+
+He did not name the general who lay over yonder, nor did we ask him the
+name.  To ask would not have been etiquette, and for him to answer would
+have been worse.  Rarely in our wanderings did we find a German soldier
+of whatsoever rank who referred to his superior officer by name.  He
+merely said "My captain" or "Our colonel." And this was of a piece with
+the plan--not entirely confined to the Germans--of making a secret of
+losses of commanders and movements of commands.
+
+We went thence then, the distance being perhaps three miles by road and
+not above eight minutes by automobile at the rate we traveled to an
+aviation camp at the back side of the town.  Here was very much to see,
+including many aeroplanes of sorts domiciled under canvas hangars and a
+cheerful, chatty, hospitable group of the most famous aviators in the
+German army--lean, keen young men all of them--and a sample specimen of
+the radish-shaped bomb which these gentlemen carry aloft with the intent
+of dropping it upon their enemies when occasion shall offer.  Each of us
+in turn solemnly hefted the bomb to feel its weight.  I should guess it
+weighed thirty pounds--say, ten pounds for the case and twenty pounds
+for its load of fearsome ingredients.  Finally, yet foremost, we were
+invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this
+particular arm of the German Army--a balloon-cannon, so called.
+
+The balloon-gun of this size is--or was at the date when I saw it--an
+exclusively German institution.  I believe the Allies have balloon-guns
+too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say.  This
+one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored-
+steel truck.  It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady's watch
+and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant
+automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd
+draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour,
+for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.
+
+The person in authority here was a youthful and blithe lieutenant--an
+Iron Cross man--with pale, shallow blue eyes and a head of bright blond
+hair.  He spun one small wheel to show how his pet's steel nose might be
+elevated almost straight upward; then turned another to show how the gun
+might be swung, as on a pivot, this way and that to command the range of
+the entire horizon, and he concluded the performance, with the aid of
+several husky lads in begrimed gray, by going through the pantomime of
+loading with a long yellow five-inch shell from the magazine behind him,
+and pretending to fire, meanwhile explaining that he could send one shot
+aloft every six seconds and with each shot reach a maximum altitude of
+between seven and eight thousand feet.  Altogether it was a very pretty
+sight to see and most edifying.  Likewise it took on an added interest
+when we learned that the blue-eyed youth and his brother of a twin
+balloon-cannon at the front of Laon had during the preceding three weeks
+brought down four of the enemy's airmen, and were exceedingly hopeful of
+fattening their joint average before the present week had ended.
+
+After that we took photographs ad lib and McCutcheon had a trip with
+Ingold, a great aviator, in a biplane, which the Germans call a double-
+decker, as distinguished from the Taube or monoplane, with its birdlike
+wings and curved tail rudder-piece.  Just as they came down, after a
+circular spin over the lines, a strange machine, presumably hostile,
+appeared far up and far away, but circled off to the south out of target
+reach before the balloon gunman could get the range of her and the aim.
+On the heels of this a biplane from another aviation field somewhere
+down the left wing dropped in quite informally bearing two grease-
+stained men to pass the time of day and borrow some gasoline.  The
+occasion appeared to demand a drink.  We all repaired, therefore, to one
+of the great canvas houses where the air birds nest night-times and
+where the airmen sleep.  There we had noggins of white wine all round,
+and a pointer dog, which was chained to an officer's trunk, begged me in
+plain pointer language to cast off his leash so he might go and stalk
+the covey of pheasants that were taking a dust-bath in the open road not
+fifty yards away.
+
+The temptation was strong, but our guides said if we meant to get to the
+battlefront before lunch it was time, and past time, we got started.
+Being thus warned we did get started.
+
+Of a battle there is this to be said--that the closer you get to it the
+less do you see of it. Always in my experiences in Belgium and my more
+recent experiences in France I found this to be true.  Take, for
+example, the present instance.  I knew that we were approximately in the
+middle sworl of the twisting scroll formed by the German center, and
+that we were at this moment entering the very tip of the enormous
+inverted V made by the frontmost German defenses.  I knew that
+stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line
+some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry
+millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy-
+wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and
+the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as
+having been fought in this war or any lesser war.  I knew this fight had
+been going on for weeks now back and forth upon the River Aisne and
+would certainly go on for weeks and perhaps months more to come.  I knew
+these things because I had been told them; but I shouldn't have known if
+I hadn't been told.  I shouldn't even have guessed it.
+
+I recall that we traveled at a cup-racing clip along a road that first
+wound like a coiling snake and then straightened like a striking snake,
+and that always we traveled through dust so thick it made a fog.  In
+this chalky land of northern France the brittle soil dries out after a
+rain very quickly, and turns into a white powder where there are wheels
+to churn it up and grit it fine.  Here surely there was an abundance of
+wheels.  We passed many marching men and many lumbering supply trains
+which were going our way, and we met many motor ambulances and many
+ammunition trucks which were coming back.  Always the ambulances were
+full and the ammunition wagons were empty.  I judge an expert in these
+things might by the fullness of the one and the emptiness of the other
+gauge the emphasis with which the fight ahead went on.  The drivers of
+the trucks nearly all wore captured French caps and French uniform
+coats, which adornment the marching men invariably regarded as a quaint
+jest to be laughed at and cheered for.
+
+We stopped at our appointed place, which was on the top of a ridge where
+a general of a corps had his headquarters.  From here one had a view--a
+fair view and, roughly, a fan-shaped view--of certain highly important
+artillery operations.  Likewise, the eminence, gentle and gradual as it
+was, commanded a mile-long stretch of the road, which formed the main
+line of communication between the front and the base; and these two
+facts in part explained why the general had made this his abiding place.
+Even my layman's mind could sense the reasons for establishing
+headquarters at such a spot.
+
+As for the general, he and his staff, at the moment of our arrival in
+their midst, were stationed at the edge of a scanty woodland where
+telescopes stood and a table with maps and charts on it.  Quite with the
+manner of men who had nothing to do except to enjoy the sunshine and
+breathe the fresh air, they strolled back and forth in pairs and trios.
+I think it must have been through force of habit that, when they halted
+to turn about and retrace the route, they stopped always for a moment or
+two and faced southward.  It was from the southward that there came
+rolling up to us the sounds of a bellowing chorus of gunfire--a
+Wagnerian chorus, truly.  That perhaps was as it should be. Wagner's
+countrymen were helping to make it.  Now the separate reports strung out
+until you could count perhaps three between reports; now they came so
+close together that the music they made was a constant roaring which
+would endure for a minute on a stretch, or half a minute anyhow.  But
+for all the noticeable heed which any uniformed men in my vicinity paid
+to this it might as well have been blasting in a distant stone quarry.
+This attitude which they maintained, coupled with the fact that
+seemingly all the firing did no damage whatsoever, only served to
+strengthen the illusion that after all it was not the actual business of
+warfare which spread itself beneath our eyes.
+
+Apparently most of the shells from the Allies' side--which of course was
+the far side from us--rose out of a dip in the contour of the land.
+Rising so, they mainly fell among or near the shattered remnants of two
+hamlets upon the nearer front of a little hill perhaps three miles from
+our location.  A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a
+wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.
+
+There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black
+as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high
+explosives.  Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little
+blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they
+told us, would be shrapnel.  The German reply to the enemy's guns issued
+from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and
+these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and
+beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and,
+curving downward, exploded out of our sight.
+
+"The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages,"
+said one of the general's aides to me.  "They are wasting their powder.
+There are many men there and some among them are Germans, but they are
+all dead men."
+
+He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the
+telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I
+focused for distance.  Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang
+up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in
+the face of a little hillock.  This trench was full of gray figures of
+the size of very small dolls.  They were moving aimlessly back and
+forth, it seemed to me, doing nothing at all.
+
+Then I saw another trench that ran slantwise up the hillock and it
+contained more of the pygmies.  A number of these pygmies came out of
+their trench--I could see them quite plainly, clambering up the steep
+wall of it--and they moved, very slowly it would seem, toward the
+crosswise trench on ahead a bit.  To reach it they had to cross a
+sloping green patch of cleared land.  So far as I might tell no
+explosive or shrapnel shower fell into them or near them, but when they
+had gone perhaps a third of the distance across the green patch there
+was a quick scatteration of their inch-high figures.  Quite distinctly I
+counted three manikins who instantly fell down flat and two others who
+went ahead a little way deliberately, and then lay down.  The rest
+darted back to the cover which they had just quit and jumped in briskly.
+The five figures remained where they had dropped and became quiet.
+Anyway, I could detect no motion in them.  They were just little gray
+strips.  Into my mind on the moment came incongruously a memory of what
+I had seen a thousand times in the composing room of a country newspaper
+where the type was set by hand.  I thought of five pica plugs lying on
+the printshop floor.
+
+It was hard for me to make myself believe that I had seen human beings
+killed and wounded.  I can hardly believe it yet--that those
+insignificant toy-figures were really and truly men.  I watched through
+the glass after that for possibly twenty minutes, until the summons came
+for lunch, but no more of the German dolls ventured out of their make-
+believe defenses to be blown flat by an invisible blast.
+
+It was a picnic lunch served on board trestles under a tree behind the
+cover of a straw-roofed shelter tent, and we ate it in quite a peaceful
+and cozy picnic fashion.  Twice during the meal an orderly came with a
+message which he had taken off a field telephone in a little pigsty of
+logs and straw fifty feet away from us; but the general each time merely
+canted his head to hear what the whispered word might be and went on
+eating.  There was no clattering in of couriers, no hurried dispatching
+of orders this way and that.  Only, just before we finished with the
+meal, he got up and walked away a few paces, and there two of his aides
+joined him and the three of them confabbed together earnestly for a
+couple of minutes or so.  While so engaged they had the air about them
+of surgeons preparing to undertake an operation and first consulting
+over the preliminary details.  Or perhaps it would be truer to say they
+looked like civil engineers discussing the working-out of an undertaking
+regarding which there was interest but no uneasiness. Assuredly they
+behaved not in the least as a general and aides would behave in a story
+book or on the stage, and when they were through they came back for
+their coffee and their cigars to the table where the rest of us sat.
+
+"We are going now to a battery of the twenty-one-centimeter guns and
+from there to the ten-centimeters," called out Lieutenant Geibel as we
+climbed aboard our cars; "and when we pass that first group of houses
+yonder we shall be under fire.  So if you have wills to make, you
+American gentlemen, you should be making them now before we start." A
+gay young officer was Lieutenant Geibel, and he just naturally would
+have his little joke whether or no.
+
+Immediately then and twice again that day we were technically presumed
+to be under fire--I use the word technically advisedly--and again the
+next day and once again two days thereafter before Antwerp, but I was
+never able to convince myself that it was so. Certainly there was no
+sense of actual danger as we sped through the empty single street of a
+despoiled and tenantless village.  All about us were the marks of what
+the shellfire had done, some fresh and still smoking, some old and dry-
+charred, but no shells dropped near us as we circled in a long swing up
+to within half a mile of the first line of German trenches and perhaps a
+mile to the left of them.
+
+Thereby we arrived safely and very speedily and without mishap at a
+battery of twenty-one-centimeter guns, standing in a gnawed sheep
+pasture behind an abandoned farmhouse, what was left of a farmhouse,
+which was to say very little of it indeed.  The guns stood in a row, and
+each one of them--there were five in all--stared with its single round
+eye at the blue sky where the sky showed above a thick screen of tall
+slim poplars growing on the far side of the farmyard.  We barely had
+time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in
+the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to
+lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from
+the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the
+sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were
+tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them
+from bogging down in miry places--I say we barely had time to note these
+details mentally when things began to happen. There was a large and much
+be-mired soldier who spraddled face downward upon his belly in one of
+the straw-lined dugouts with his ear hitched to a telephone.  Without
+lifting his head or turning it he sang out.  At that all the other men
+sprang up very promptly. Before, they had been sprawled about in sunny
+places, smoking and sleeping, and writing on postcards.  Postcards,
+butter and beer--these are the German private's luxuries, but most of
+all postcards.  The men bestirred themselves.
+
+"You are in luck, gentlemen," said the lieutenant.  "This battery has
+been idle all day, but now it is to begin firing.  The order to fire
+just came.  The balloon operator, who is in communication with the
+observation pits beyond the foremost infantry trenches, will give the
+range and the distance.  Listen, please." He held up his hand for
+silence, intent on hearing what the man at the telephone was repeating
+back over the line.  "Ah, that's it--5400 meters straight over the tree
+tops."
+
+He waved us together into a more compact group.  "That's the idea.
+Stand here, please, behind Number One gun, and watch straight ahead of
+you for the shot--you must watch very closely or you will miss it--and
+remember to keep your mouth open to save your eardrums from being
+injured by the concussion."
+
+So far as I personally was concerned this last bit of advice was
+unnecessary--my mouth was open already.  Four men trotted to a magazine
+that was in an earthen kennel and came back bearing a wheelless sheet-
+metal barrow on which rested a three-foot-long brass shell, very trim
+and slim and handsome and shiny like gold.  It was an expensive-looking
+shell and quite ornate.  At the tail of Number One the bearers heaved
+the barrow up shoulder-high, at the same time tilting it forward.  Then
+a round vent opened magically and the cyclops sucked the morsel forward
+into its gullet, thus reversing the natural swallowing process, and
+smacked its steel lip behind it with a loud and greasy snuck! A glutton
+of a gun--you could tell that from the sound it made.
+
+A lieutenant snapped out something, a sergeant snapped it back to him,
+the gun crew jumped aside, balancing themselves on tiptoe with their
+mouths all agape, and the gun-firer either pulled a lever out or else
+pushed one home, I couldn't tell which.  Then everything--sky and woods
+and field and all--fused and ran together in a great spatter of red
+flame and white smoke, and the earth beneath our feet shivered and shook
+as the twenty-one-centimeter spat out its twenty-one-centimeter
+mouthful.  A vast obscenity of sound beat upon us, making us reel
+backward, and for just the one-thousandth part of a second I saw a round
+white spot, like a new baseball, against a cloud background.  The
+poplars, which had bent forward as if before a quick wind-squall, stood
+up, trembling in their tops, and we dared to breathe again.  Then each
+in its turn the other four guns spoke, profaning the welkin, and we
+rocked on our heels like drunken men, and I remember there was a queer
+taste, as of something burned, in my mouth.  All of which was very fine,
+no doubt, and very inspiring, too, if one cared deeply for that sort of
+thing; but to myself, when the hemisphere had ceased from its
+quiverings, I said:
+
+"It isn't true--this isn't war; it's just a costly, useless game of
+playing at war.  Behold, now, these guns did not fire at anybody visible
+or anything tangible.  They merely elevated their muzzles into the sky
+and fired into the sky to make a great tumult and spoil the good air
+with a bad-tasting smoke.  No enemy is in sight and no enemy will answer
+back; therefore no enemy exists.  It is all a useless and a fussy
+business, signifying nothing."
+
+Nor did any enemy answer back.  The guns having been fired with due pomp
+and circumstance, the gunners went back to those pipe-smoking and
+postcard-writing pursuits of theirs and everything was as before--
+peaceful and entirely serene.  Only the telephone man remained in his
+bed in the straw with his ear at his telephone.  He was still couched
+there, spraddling ridiculously on his stomach, with his legs
+outstretched in a sawbuck pattern, as we came away.
+
+"It isn't always quite so quiet hereabouts," said the lieutenant.  "The
+commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped
+some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two.  Perhaps things
+will be brisker at the ten-centimeter-gun battery." He spoke as one who
+regretted that the show which he offered was not more exciting.
+
+The twenty-one-centimeters, as I have told you, were in the edge of the
+woods, with leafy ambushes about them, but the little ten-centimeter
+guns ranged themselves quite boldly in a meadow of rank long grass just
+under the weather-rim of a small hill.  They were buried to their
+haunches--if a field gun may be said to have haunches--in depressions
+gouged out by their own frequent recoils; otherwise they were without
+concealment of any sort.  To reach them we rode a mile or two and then
+walked a quarter of a mile through a series of chalky bare gullies, and
+our escorts made us stoop low and hurry fast wherever the path wound up
+to the crest of the bank, lest our figures, being outlined against the
+sky, should betray our whereabouts and, what was more important, the
+whereabouts of the battery to the sharpshooters in the French rifle pits
+forward of the French infantry trenches and not exceeding a mile from
+us.
+
+We stopped first at an observation station cunningly hidden in a haw
+thicket on the brow of a steep and heavily wooded defile overlooking the
+right side of the river valley---the river, however, being entirely out
+of sight.  Standing here we heard the guns speak apparently from almost
+beneath our feet, and three or four seconds thereafter we saw five
+little puffballs of white smoke uncurling above a line of trees across
+the valley. Somebody said this was our battery shelling the French and
+English in those woods yonder, but you could hardly be expected to
+believe that, since no reply came back and no French or English
+whatsoever showed themselves.  Altogether it seemed a most impotent and
+impersonal proceeding; and when the novelty of waiting for the blast of
+sound and then watching for the smoke plumes to appear had worn off, as
+it very soon did, we visited the guns themselves.  They were not under
+our feet at all.  They were some two hundred yards away, across a field
+where the telephone wires stretched over the old plow furrows and
+through the rank meadow grass, like springs to catch woodcock.
+
+Here again the trick of taking a message off the telephone and shouting
+it forth from the mouth of a fox burrow was repeated.  Whenever this
+procedure came to pass a sergeant who had strained his vocal cords from
+much giving of orders would swell out his chest and throw back his head
+and shriek hoarsely with what was left of his voice, which wasn't much.
+This meant a fury of noise resulting instantly and much white smoke to
+follow.  For a while the guns were fired singly and then they were fired
+in salvos; and you might mark how the grass for fifty yards in front of
+the muzzles would lie on the earth quite flat and then stand erect, and
+how the guns, like shying bronchos, would leap backward upon their
+carriages and then slide forward again as the air in the air cushions
+took up the kick.  Also we took note that the crews of the ten-
+centimeters had built for themselves dugouts to sleep in and to live in,
+and had covered the sod roofs over with straw and broken tree limbs.  We
+judged they would be very glad indeed to crawl into those same shelters
+when night came, for they had been serving the guns all day and plainly
+were about as weary as men could be.  To burn powder hour after hour and
+day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom
+you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober,
+uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about
+themselves--the ghastly unreality of the proposition left me mentally
+numbed.
+
+Howsoever, we arrived not long after that at a field hospital--namely,
+Field Hospital Number 36, and here was realism enough to satisfy the
+lexicographer who first coined the word.  This field hospital was
+established in eight abandoned houses of the abandoned small French
+village of Colligis, and all eight houses were crowded with wounded men
+lying as closely as they could lie upon mattresses placed side by side
+on the floors, with just room to step between the mattresses.  Be it
+remembered also that these were all men too seriously wounded to be
+moved even to a point as close as Laon; those more lightly injured than
+these were already carried back to the main hospitals.
+
+We went into one room containing only men suffering from chest wounds,
+who coughed and wheezed and constantly fought off the swarming flies
+that assailed them, and into another room given over entirely to
+brutally abbreviated human fragments--fractional parts of men who had
+lost their arms or legs.  On the far mattress against the wall lay a
+little pale German with his legs gone below the knees, who smiled upward
+at the ceiling and was quite chipper.
+
+"A wonderful man, that little chap," said one of the surgeons to me.
+"When they first brought him here two weeks ago I said to him: 'It's
+hard on you that you should lose both your feet,' and he looked up at me
+and grinned and said: 'Herr Doctor, it might have been worse.  It might
+have been my hands--and me a tailor by trade!'"
+
+This surgeon told us he had an American wife, and he asked me to bear a
+message for him to his wife's people in the States.  So if these lines
+should come to the notice of Mrs. Rosamond Harris, who lives at
+Hinesburg, Vermont, she may know that her son-in-law, Doctor Schilling,
+was at last accounts very busy and very well, although coated with white
+dust--face, head and eyebrows--so that he reminded me of a clown in a
+pantomime, and dyed as to his hands with iodine to an extent that made
+his fingers look like pieces of well-cured meerschaum.
+
+They were bringing in more men, newly wounded that day, as we came out
+of Doctor Schilling's improvised operating room in the little village
+schoolhouse, and one of the litter bearers was a smart-faced little
+London Cockney, a captured English ambulance-hand, who wore a German
+soldier's cap to save him from possible annoyance as he went about his
+work.  Not very many wounded had arrived since the morning--it was a
+dull day for them, the surgeons said--but I took note that, when the Red
+Cross men put down a canvas stretcher upon the courtyard flags and
+shortly thereafter took it up again, it left a broad red smear where it
+rested against the flat stones.  Also this stretcher and all the other
+stretchers had been so sagged by the weight of bodies that they
+threatened to rip from the frames, and so stained by that which had
+stained them that the canvas was as stiff as though it had been
+varnished and revarnished with many coats of brown shellac.  But it
+wasn't shellac.  There is just one fluid which leaves that brown, hard
+coating when it dries upon woven cloth.
+
+As I recall now we had come through the gate of the schoolhouse to where
+the automobiles stood when a puff of wind, blowing to us from the left,
+which meant from across the battlefront, brought to our noses a certain
+smell which we already knew full well.
+
+"You get it, I see," said the German officer who stood alongside me.
+"It comes from three miles off, but you can get it five miles distant
+when the wind is strong.  That"--and he waved his left arm toward it as
+though the stench had been a visible thing--"that explains why tobacco
+is so scarce with us among the staff back yonder in Laon.  All the
+tobacco which can be spared is sent to the men in the front trenches.
+As long as they smoke and keep on smoking they can stand--that!
+
+"You see," he went on painstakingly, "the situation out there at Cerny
+is like this: The French and English, but mainly the English, held the
+ground firSt. We drove them back and they lost very heavily.  In places
+their trenches were actually full of dead and dying men when we took
+those trenches.
+
+"You could have buried them merely by filling up the trenches with
+earth.  And that old beet-sugar factory which you saw this noon when we
+were at field headquarters--it was crowded with badly wounded
+Englishmen.
+
+"At once they rallied and forced us back, and now it was our turn to
+lose heavily.  That was nearly three weeks ago, and since then the
+ground over which we fought has been debatable ground, lying between our
+lines and the enemy's lines--a stretch four miles long and half a mile
+wide that is literally carpeted with bodies of dead men.  They weren't
+all dead at first. For two days and nights our men in the earthworks
+heard the cries of those who still lived, and the sound of them almost
+drove them mad.  There was no reaching the wounded, though, either from
+our lines or from the Allies' lines.  Those who tried to reach them were
+themselves killed.  Now there are only dead out there--thousands of
+dead, I think.  And they have been there twenty days.  Once in a while a
+shell strikes that old sugar mill or falls into one of those trenches.
+Then--well, then, it is worse for those who serve in the front lines."
+
+"But in the name of God, man," I said, "why don't they call a truce--
+both sides--and put that horror underground?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"War is different now," he said.  "Truces are out of fashion."
+
+I stood there and I smelled that smell.  And I thought of all those
+flies, and those blood-stiffened stretchers, and those little inch-long
+figures which I myself, looking through that telescope, had seen lying
+on the green hill, and those automobiles loaded with mangled men, and
+War de Luxe betrayed itself to me.  Beneath its bogus glamour I saw war
+for what it is--the next morning of drunken glory.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 12
+
+The Rut of Big Guns in France
+
+
+Let me say at the outset of this chapter that I do not set up as one
+professing to have any knowledge whatsoever of so-called military
+science.  The more I have seen of the carrying-on of the actual business
+of war, the less able do I seem to be to understand the meanings of the
+business.  For me strategy remains a closed book.  Even the simplest
+primary lessons of it, the A B C's of it, continue to impress me as
+being stupid, but none the less unplumbable mysteries.
+
+The physical aspects of campaigning I can in a way grasp.  At least I
+flatter myself that I can.  A man would have to be deaf and dumb and
+blind not to grasp them, did they reveal themselves before him as they
+have revealed themselves before me.  Indeed, if he preserved only the
+faculty of scent unimpaired he might still be able to comprehend the
+thing, since, as I have said before, war in its commoner phases is not
+so much a sight as a great bad smell.  As for the rudiments of the
+system which dictates the movements of troops in large masses or in
+small, which sacrifices thousands of men to take a town or hold a river
+when that town and that river, physically considered, appear to be of no
+consequence whatsoever, those elements I have not been able to sense,
+even though I studied the matter most diligently.  So after sundry
+months of first-hand observation in one of the theaters of hostilities,
+I tell myself that the trade of fighting is a trade to be learned by
+slow and laborious degrees, and even then may be learned with
+thoroughness only by one who has a natural aptitude for it.  Either
+that, or else I am most extraordinarily thick-headed, for I own that I
+am still as complete a greenhorn now as I was at the beginning.
+
+Having made the confession which is said to be good for the soul, and
+which in any event has the merit of blunting in advance the critical
+judgments of the expert, since he must pity my ignorance and my
+innocence even though he quarrel with my conclusions, I now assume the
+role of prophet long enough to venture to say that the day of the modern
+walled fort is over and done with.  I do not presume to speak regarding
+coast defenses maintained for the purposes of repelling attacks or
+invasions from the sea.  I am speaking with regard to land defenses
+which are assailable by land forces.  I believe in the future great
+wars--if indeed there are to be any more great wars following after this
+one--that the nations involved, instead of buttoning their frontiers
+down with great fortresses and ringing their principal cities about with
+circles of protecting works, will put their trust more and more in
+transportable cannon of a caliber and a projecting force greater than
+any yet built or planned.  I make this assertion after viewing the
+visible results of the operations of the German 42-centimeter guns in
+Belgium and France, notably at Liege in the former country and at
+Maubeuge in the latter.
+
+Except for purposes of frightening non-combatants the Zeppelins
+apparently have proved of most dubious value; nor, barring its value as
+a scout--a field in which it is of marvelous efficiency--does the
+aeroplane appear to have been of much consequence in inflicting loss
+upon the enemy.  Of the comparatively new devices for waging war, the
+submarine and the great gun alone seem to have justified in any great
+degree the hopes of their sponsors.
+
+Since I came back out of the war zone I have met persons who questioned
+the existence of a 42-centimeter gun, they holding it to be a nightmare
+created out of the German imagination with intent to break the
+confidence of the enemies of Germany.  I did not see a 42-centimeter gun
+with my own eyes, and personally I doubt whether the Germans had as many
+of them as they claimed to have; but I talked with one entirely reliable
+witness, an American consular officer, who saw a 42-centimeter gun as it
+was being transported to the front in the opening week of the war, and
+with another American, a diplomat of high rank, who interviewed a man
+who saw one of these guns, and who in detailing the conversation to me
+said the spectator had been literally stunned by the size and length and
+the whole terrific contour of the monster.
+
+Finally, I know from personal experience that these guns have been
+employed, and employed with a result that goes past adequate
+description; but if I hadn't seen the effect of their fire I wouldn't
+have believed it were true.  I wouldn't have believed anything evolved
+out of the brains of men and put together by the fingers of men could
+operate with such devilish accuracy to compass such utter destruction.
+I would have said it was some planetic force, some convulsion of natural
+forces, and not an agency of human devisement, that turned Fort Loncin
+inside out, and transformed it within a space of hours from a supposedly
+impregnable stronghold into a hodgepodge of complete and hideous
+ruination.  And what befell Fort Loncin on the hills behind Liege befell
+Fort Des Sarts outside of Maubeuge, as I have reason to know.  When the
+first of the 42-centimeters emerged from Essen it took a team of thirty
+horses to haul it; and with it out of that nest of the Prussian war
+eagle came also a force of mechanics and engineers to set it up and aim
+it and fire it.
+
+Here, too, is an interesting fact that I have not seen printed anywhere,
+though I heard it often enough in Germany: by reason of its bulk the 42-
+centimeter must be mounted upon a concrete base before it can be used.
+Heretofore the concrete which was available for this purpose required at
+least a fortnight of exposure before it was sufficiently firm and
+hardened; but when Fraulein Bertha Krupp's engineers escorted the
+Fraulein's newest and most impressive steel masterpiece to the war, they
+brought along with them the ingredients for a new kind of concrete; and
+those who claim to have been present on the occasion declare that within
+forty-eight hours after they had mixed and molded it, it was ready to
+bear the weight of the guns and withstand the shock of their recoil.
+
+This having been done, I conceive of the operators as hoisting their
+guns into position, and posting up a set of rules--even in time of war
+it is impossible to imagine the Germans doing anything of importance
+without a set of rules to go by--and working out the distance by
+mathematics, and then turning loose their potential cataclysms upon the
+stubborn forts which opposed their further progress.  From the viewpoint
+of the Germans the consequences to the foe must amply have justified the
+trouble and the cost. For where a 42-centimeter shell falls it does more
+than merely alter landscape; almost you might say it alters geography.
+
+In the open field, where he must aim his gun with his own eye and
+discharge it with his own finger, I take it the Kaiser's private soldier
+is no great shakes as a marksman.  The Germans themselves begrudgingly
+admitted the French excelled them in the use of light artillery.  There
+was wonderment as well as reluctance in this concession.  To them it
+seemed well-nigh incredible that any nation should be their superiors in
+any department pertaining to the practice of war.  They could not bring
+themselves fully to understand it.  It remained as much a puzzle to them
+as the unaccountable obstinacy of the English in refusing to be budged
+out of their position by displays of cold steel, or to be shaken by the
+volleying, bull-like roar of the German charging cry, which at first the
+Germans counted upon as being almost as efficacious as the bayonet for
+instilling a wholesome fear of the German war god into the souls of
+their foes.
+
+While giving the Frenchmen credit for knowing how to handle and serve
+small field-pieces, the Germans nevertheless insisted that their
+infantry fire or their skirmish fire was as deadly as that of the
+Allies, or even deadlier.  This I was not prepared to believe.  I do not
+think the German is a good rifle shot by instinct, as the American often
+is, and in a lesser degree, perhaps, the Englishman is, too.  But where
+he can work the range out on paper, where he has to do with mechanics
+instead of a shifting mark, where he can apply to the details of gun
+firing the exact principles of arithmetic, I am pretty sure the German
+is as good a gunner as may be found on the Continent of Europe to-day.
+This may not apply to him at sea, for he has neither the sailor
+traditions nor the inherited naval craftsmanship of the English; but
+judging by what I have seen I am quite certain that with the solid earth
+beneath him and a set of figures before him and an enemy out of sight of
+him to be damaged he is in a class all by himself.
+
+A German staff officer, who professed to have been present, told me that
+at Manonvilla--so he spelled the name--a 42-centimeter gun was fired
+one hundred and forty-seven times from a distance of 14,000 meters at a
+fort measuring 600 meters in length by 400 meters in breadth--a very
+small target, indeed, considering the range--and that investigation
+after the capture of the fort showed not a single one of the one hundred
+and forty-seven shots had been an outright miss.  Some few, he said, hit
+the walls or at the bases of the walls, but all the others, he claimed,
+had bull's-eyed into the fort itself.
+
+Subsequently, on subjecting this tale to the acid test of second thought
+I was compelled to doubt what the staff officer had said.  To begin
+with, I didn't understand how a 42-centimeter gun could be fired one
+hundred and forty-seven times without its wearing out, for I have often
+heard that the larger the bore of your gun and the heavier the charge of
+explosives which it carries, the shorter is its period of efficiency..
+In the second place, it didn't seem possible after being hit one hundred
+and forty-seven times with 42-centimeter bombs that enough of any fort
+of whatsoever size would be left to permit of a tallying-up of separate
+shots.  Ten shots properly placed should have razed it; twenty more
+should have blown its leveled remainder to powder and scattered the
+powder.
+
+Be the facts what they may with regard to this case of the fort of
+Manonvilla--if that be its proper name--I am prepared to speak with the
+assurance of an eyewitness concerning the effect of the German fire upon
+the defenses of Maubeuge.  What I saw at Liege I have described in a
+previous chapter of this volume.  What I saw at Maubeuge was even more
+convincing testimony, had I needed it, that the Germans had a 42-
+centimeter gun, and that, given certain favored conditions, they knew
+how to handle it effectively.
+
+We spent the better part of a day in two of the forts which were fondly
+presumed to guard Maubeuge toward the north--Fort Des Sarts and Fort
+Boussois; but Fort Des Sarts was the one where the 42-centimeter gun
+gave the first exhibition of its powers upon French soil in this war, so
+we went there first. To reach it we ran a matter of seven kilometers
+through a succession of villages, each with its mutely eloquent tale of
+devastation and general smash to tell; each with its group of
+contemptuously tolerant German soldiers on guard and its handful of
+natives, striving feebly to piece together the broken and bankrupt
+fragments of their worldly affairs.
+
+Approaching Des Sarts more nearly we came to a longish stretch of
+highway, which the French had cleared of visual obstructions in
+anticipation of resistance by infantry in the event that the outer ring
+of defenses gave way before the German bombardment.  It had all been
+labor in vain, for the town capitulated after the outposts fell; but it
+must have been very great labor.  Any number of fine elm trees had been
+felled and their boughs, stripped now of leaves, stuck up like bare
+bones.  There were holes in the metaled road where misaimed shells had
+descended, and in any one of these holes you might have buried a horse.
+A little gray church stood off by itself upon the plain.  It had been
+homely enough to start with.  Now with its steeple shorn away and one of
+its two belfry windows obliterated by a straying shot it had a rakish,
+cock-eyed look to it.
+
+Just beyond where the church was our chauffeur halted the car in
+obedience to an order from the staff officer who had been detailed by
+Major von Abercron, commandant of Maubeuge, to accompany us on this
+particular excursion.  Our guide pointed off to the right.  "There," he
+said, "is where we dropped the first of our big ones when we were trying
+to get the range of the fort.  You see our guns were posted at a point
+between eight and nine kilometers away and at the start we overshot a
+trifle.  Still to the garrison yonder it must have been an unhappy
+foretaste of what they might shortly expect, when they saw the forty-
+twos striking here in this field and saw what execution they did among
+the cabbage and the beet patches."
+
+We left the car and, following our guide, went to look.  Spaced very
+neatly at intervals apart of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards a series
+of craters broke the surface of the earth.  Considering the tools which
+dug them they were rather symmetrical craters, not jagged and gouged,
+but with smooth walls and each in shape a perfect funnel.  We measured
+roughly a typical specimen.  Across the top it was between fifty and
+sixty feet in diameter, and it sloped down evenly for a depth of
+eighteen feet in the chalky soil to a pointed bottom, where two men
+would have difficulty standing together without treading upon each
+other's toes.  Its sides were lined with loose pellets of earth of the
+average size of a tennis ball, and when we slid down into the hole these
+rounded clods accompanied us in small avalanches.
+
+We were filled with astonishment, first, that an explosive grenade,
+weighing upward of a ton, could be so constructed that it would
+penetrate thus far into firm and solid earth before it exploded; and,
+second, that it could make such a neat saucer of a hole when it did
+explode.  But there was a still more amazing thing to be pondered.  Of
+the earth which had been dispossessed from the crevasse, amounting to a
+great many wagonloads, no sign remained.  It was not heaped up about the
+lips of the funnel; it was not visibly scattered over the nearermost
+furrows of that truck field.  So far as we might tell it was utterly
+gone; and from that we deduced that the force of the explosion had been
+sufficient to pulverize the clay so finely and cast it so far and so
+wide that it fell upon the surface in a fine shower, leaving no traces
+unless one made a minute search for it. Noting the wonder upon our
+faces, the officer was moved to speak further in a tone of sincere
+admiration, touching on the capabilities of the crowning achievement of
+the Krupp works:
+
+"Pretty strong medicine, eh? Well, wait until I have shown you American
+gentlemen what remains of the fort; then you will better understand.
+Even here, out in the open, for a radius of a hundred and fifty meters,
+any man, conceding he wasn't killed outright, would be knocked senseless
+and after that for hours, even for days, perhaps, he would be entirely
+unnerved.  The force of the concussion appears to have that effect upon
+persons who are at a considerable distance--it rips their nerves to
+tatters.  Some seem numbed and dazed; others develop an acute
+hysteria.
+
+"Highly interesting, is it not? Listen then; here is something even more
+interesting: Within an inclosed space, where there is a roof to hold in
+the gas generated by the explosion or where there are reasonably high
+walls, the man who escapes being torn apart in the instant of impact, or
+who escapes being crushed to death by collapsing masonry, or killed by
+flying fragments, is exceedingly likely to choke to death as he lies
+temporarily paralyzed and helpless from the shock.  I was at Liege and
+again here, and I know from my own observations that this is true.  At
+Liege particularly many of the garrison were caught and penned up in
+underground casements, and there we found them afterward dead, but with
+no marks of wounds upon them--they had been asphyxiated."
+
+I suppose in times of peace the speaker was a reasonably kind man and
+reasonably regardful of the rights of his fellowmen.  Certainly he was
+most courteous to us and most considerate; but he described this
+slaughter-pit scene with the enthusiasm of one who was a partner in a
+most creditable and worthy enterprise.
+
+Immediately about Des Sarts stood many telegraph poles in a row, for
+here the road, which was the main road from Paris to Brussels, curved
+close up under the grass-covered bastions.  All the telegraph wires had
+been cut, and they dangled about the bases of the poles in snarled
+tangles like love vines.  The ditches paralleling the road were choked
+with felled trees, and, what with the naked limbs, were as spiky as shad
+spines.  Of the small cottages which once had stood in the vicinity of
+the fort not one remained standing.  Their sites were marked by
+flattened heaps of brick and plaster from which charred ends of rafters
+protruded.  It was as though a giant had sat himself down upon each
+little house in turn and squashed it to the foundation stones.
+
+As a fort Des Sarts dated back to 1883.  I speak of it in the past
+tense, because the Germans had put it in that tense.  As a fort, or as
+anything resembling a fort, it had ceased to be, absolutely.  The inner
+works of it--the redan and the underground barracks, and the magazines,
+and all--were built after the style .followed by military engineers back
+in 1883, having revetments faced up with brick and stone; but only a
+little while ago--in the summer of 1913, to be exact--the job of
+inclosing the original works with a glacis of a newer type had been
+completed.  So when the Germans came along in the first week of
+September it was in most respects made over into a modern fort.  No
+doubt the re-enforcements of reserves that hurried into it to strengthen
+the regular garrison counted themselves lucky men to have so massive and
+stout a shelter from which to fight an enemy who must work in the open
+against them.  Poor devils, their hopes crumbled along with their walls
+when the Germans brought up the forty-twos.
+
+We entered in through a breach in the first parapet and crossed, one at
+a time, on a tottery wooden bridge which was propped across a fossé half
+full of rubble, and so came to what had been the heart of the fort of
+Des Sarts.  Had I not already gathered some notion of the powers for
+destruction of those one-ton, four-foot-long shells, I should have said
+that the spot where we halted had been battered and crashed at for
+hours; that scores and perhaps hundreds of bombs had been plumped into
+it.  Now, though, I was prepared to believe the German captain when he
+said probably not more than five or six of the devil devices had struck
+this target.  Make it six for good measure.  Conceive each of the six as
+having been dammed by a hurricane and sired by an earthquake, and as
+being related to an active volcano on one side of the family and to a
+flaming meteor on the other.  Conceive it as falling upon a man-made,
+masonry-walled burrow in the earth and being followed in rapid
+succession by five of its blood brethren; then you will begin to get
+some fashion of mental photograph of the result.  I confess myself as
+unable to supply any better suggestion for a comparison.  Nor shall I
+attempt to describe the picture in any considerable detail.  I only know
+that for the first time in my life I realized the full and adequate
+meaning of the word chaos.  The proper definition of it was spread
+broadcast before my eyes.
+
+Appreciating the impossibility of comprehending the full scope of the
+disaster which here had befallen, or of putting it concretely into words
+if I did comprehend it, I sought to pick out small individual details,
+which was hard to do, too, seeing that all things were jumbled together
+so.  This had been a series of cunningly buried tunnels and arcades,
+with cozy subterranean dormitories opening off of side passages, and
+still farther down there had been magazines and storage spaces.  Now it
+was all a hole in the ground, and the force which blasted it out had
+then pulled the hole in behind itself.  We stood on the verge, looking
+downward into a chasm which seemed to split its way to infinite depths,
+although in fact it was probably not nearly so deep as it appeared.  If
+we looked upward there, forty feet above our heads, was a wide riven gap
+in the earth crust.
+
+Near me I discerned a litter of metal fragments.  From such of the
+scraps as retained any shape at all, I figured that they had been part
+of the protective casing of a gun mounted somewhere above.  The missile
+which wrecked the gun flung its armor down here.  I searched my brain
+for a simile which might serve to give a notion of the present state of
+that steel jacket.  I didn't find the one I wanted, but if you will
+think of an earthenware pot which has been thrown from a very high
+building upon a brick sidewalk you may have some idea of what I saw.
+
+At that, it was no completer a ruin than any of the surrounding debris.
+Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained
+recognizably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed frames
+bolted to the back wall of what I think must have been a barrack room
+for officers.  The room itself was no longer there.  Brick, mortar,
+stone, concrete, steel reinforcements, iron props, the hard-packed
+earth, had been ripped out and churned into indistinguishable bits, but
+those two iron beds hung fast to a discolored patch of plastering,
+though the floor was gone from beneath them. Seemingly they were hardly
+damaged.  One gathered that a 42-centimeter shell possessed in some
+degree the freakishness which we associate with the behavior of
+cyclones.
+
+We were told that at the last, when the guns had been silenced and
+dismounted and the walls had been pierced and the embrasures blown
+bodily away, the garrison, or what was left of it, fled to these
+lowermost shelters.  But the burrowing bombs found the refugees out and
+killed them, nearly all, and those of them who died were still buried
+beneath our feet in as hideous a sepulcher as ever was digged.  There
+was no getting them out from that tomb.  The Crack of Doom will find
+them still there, I guess.
+
+To reach a portion of Des Sarts, as yet un-visited, we skirted the gape
+of the crater, climbing over craggy accumulations of wreckage, and
+traversed a tunnel with an arched roof and mildewed brick walls, like a
+wine vault.  The floor of it was littered with the knapsacks and water
+bottles of dead or captured men, with useless rifles broken at the
+stocks and bent in the barrels, and with suchlike riffle.  At the far
+end of the passage we came out into the open at the back side of the
+fort.
+
+"Right here," said the officer who was piloting us, "I witnessed a sight
+which made a deeper impression upon me than anything I have seen in this
+campaign.  After the white flag had been hoisted by the survivors and we
+had marched in, I halted my men just here at the entrance to this
+arcade.  We didn't dare venture into the redan, for sporadic explosions
+were still occurring in the ammunition stores.  Also there were fires
+raging. Smoke was pouring thickly out of the mouth of the tunnel.  It
+didn't seem possible that there could be anyone alive back yonder.
+
+"All of a sudden, men began to come out of the tunnel.  They came and
+came until there were nearly two hundred of them--French reservists
+mostly.  They were crazy men--crazy for the time being, and still crazy,
+I expect, some of them.  They came out staggering, choking, falling down
+and getting up again.  You see, their nerves were gone. The fumes, the
+gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they had
+escaped--all these had distracted them.  They danced, sang, wept,
+laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously
+until they dropped.  They were deafened, and some of them could not see
+but had to grope their way.  I remember one man who sat down and pulled
+off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his
+bare feet until he cut the bottoms of them to pieces.  I don't care to
+see anything like that again--even if it is my enemies that suffer it."
+
+He told it so vividly, that standing alongside of him before the tunnel
+opening I could see the procession myself--those two hundred men who had
+drained horror to its lees and were drunk on it.
+
+We went to Fort Boussois, some four miles away.  It was another of the
+keys to the town. It was taken on September sixth; on the next day,
+September seventh, the citadel surrendered.  Here, in lieu of the 42-
+centimeter, which was otherwise engaged for the moment, the attacking
+forces brought into play an Austrian battery of 30-centimeter guns.  So
+far as I have been able to ascertain this was the only Austrian command
+which had any part in the western campaigns.  The Austrian gunners
+shelled the fort until the German infantry had been massed in a forest
+to the northward.  Late in the afternoon the infantry charged across a
+succession of cleared fields and captured the outer slopes. With these
+in their possession it didn't take them very long to compel the
+surrender of Fort Boussois, especially as the defenders had already been
+terribly cut up by the artillery fire.
+
+The Austrians must have been first-rate marksmen.  One of their shells
+fell squarely upon the rounded dome of a big armored turret which was
+sunk in the earth and chipped off the top of it as you would chip your
+breakfast egg.  The men who manned the guns in that revolving turret
+must all have died in a flash of time.  The impact of the blow was such
+that the leaden solder which filled the interstices of the segments of
+the turret was squeezed out from between the plates in curly strips,
+like icing from between the layers of a misused birthday cake.
+
+Back within the main works we saw where a shell had bored a smooth,
+round orifice through eight meters of earth and a meter and a half of
+concrete and steel plates. Peering into the shaft we could make out the
+floor of a tunnel some thirty feet down.  To judge by its effects, this
+shell had been of a different type from any others whose work we had
+witnessed.  Apparently it had been devised to excavate holes rather than
+to explode, and when we asked questions about it we speedily ascertained
+that our guide did not care to discuss the gun which had inflicted this
+particular bit of damage.
+
+"It is not permitted to speak of this matter," he said in explanation of
+his attitude.  "It is a military secret, this invention.  We call it a
+mine gun."
+
+Every man to his taste.  I should have called it a well-digger.
+
+Erect upon the highest stretch of riddled walls, with his legs spraddled
+far apart and his arms jerking in expressive gestures, he told us how
+the German infantry had advanced across the open ground.  It had been
+hard, he said, to hold the men back until the order for the charge was
+given, and then they burst from their cover and came on at a dead run,
+cheering.
+
+"It was very fine," he added.  "Very glorious."
+
+"Did you have any losses in the charge?" asked one of our party.
+
+"Oh, yes," he answered, as though that part of the proceeding was purely
+an incidental detail and of no great consequence.  "We lost many men
+here--very many--several thousands, I think.  Most of them are buried
+where you see those long ridges in the second field beyond."
+
+In a sheltered corner of a redoubt, close up under a parapet and
+sheathed on its inner side with masonry, was a single grave.  The
+pounding feet of many fighting men had beaten the mound flat, but a
+small wooden cross still stood in the soil, and on it in French were
+penciled the words:
+
+"Here lies Lieutenant Verner, killed in the charge of battle."
+
+His men must have thought well of the lieutenant to take the time, in
+the midst of the defense, to bury him in the place where he fell, for
+there were no other graves to be seen within the fort.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 13
+
+Those Yellow Pine Boxes
+
+
+It was late in the short afternoon, and getting close on to twilight,
+when we got back into the town.  Except for the soldiers there was
+little life stirring in the twisting streets.  There was a funeral or so
+in progress.  It seemed to us that always, no matter where we stopped,
+in whatsoever town or at whatsoever hour, some dead soldier was being
+put away.  Still, I suppose we shouldn't have felt any surprise at that.
+By now half of Europe was one great funeral.  Part of it was on crutches
+and part of it was in the graveyard and the rest of it was in the field.
+
+Daily in these towns back behind the firing lines a certain percentage
+of the invalided and the injured, who had been brought thus far before
+their condition became actually serious, would die; and twice daily, or
+oftener, the dead would be buried with military honors.
+
+So naturally we were eyewitnesses to a great many of these funerals.
+Somehow they impressed me more than the sight of dead men being
+hurriedly shoveled under ground on the battle front where they had
+fallen.  Perhaps it was the consciousness that those who had these
+formal, separate burials were men who came alive out of the fighting,
+and who, even after being stricken, had a chance for life and then lost
+it.  Perhaps it was the small show of ceremony and ritual which marked
+each one--the firing squad, the clergyman in his robes, the tramping
+escort--that left so enduring an impress upon my mind.  I did not try to
+analyze the reasons; but I know my companions felt as I did.
+
+I remember quite distinctly the very first of these funerals that I
+witnessed.  Possibly I remember it with such distinctness because it was
+the firSt. On our way to the advance positions of the Germans we had
+come as far as Chimay, which is an old Belgian town just over the
+frontier from France.  I was sitting on a bench just outside the doorway
+of a parochial school conducted by nuns, which had been taken over by
+the conquerors and converted into a temporary receiving hospital for men
+who were too seriously wounded to stand the journey up into Germany.
+All the surgeons on duty here were Germans, but the nursing force was
+about equally divided between nuns and Lutheran deaconesses who had been
+brought overland for this duty.  Also there were several volunteer
+nurses--the wife of an officer, a wealthy widow from Dusseldorf and a
+school-teacher from Coblenz among them.  Catholic and Protestant,
+Belgian and French and German, they all labored together, cheerfully and
+earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant
+sorts.
+
+One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex
+officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a
+slightly wounded major for an escort.  She was starting on a three-
+hundred-mile automobile run through a half subdued and dangerous
+country, meaning to visit base hospitals along the German frontier until
+she found a supply of anti-tetanus serum.  Lockjaw, developing from
+seemingly trivial wounds in foot or hand, had already killed six men at
+Chimay within a week.  Four more were dying of the same disease.  So,
+since no able-bodied men could be spared from the overworked staffs of
+the lazarets, she was going for a stock of the serum which might save
+still other victims.  She meant to travel day and night, and if a bullet
+didn't stop her and if the automobile didn't go through a temporary
+bridge she would be back, she thought, within forty-eight hours.  She
+had already made several trips of the sort upon similar missions. Once
+her car had been fired at and once it had been wrecked, but she was
+going again. She was from near Cologne, the wife of a rich manufacturer
+now serving as a captain of reserves.  She hadn't heard from him in four
+weeks.  She didn't know whether he still lived.  She hoped he lived, she
+told us with simple fortitude, but of course these times one never knew.
+
+It was just before sundown.  The nuns had gone upstairs to their little
+chapel for evening services.  Through an open window of the chapel just
+above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the
+sonorous Latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their
+devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of vesper
+sparrows.  Behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty wounded
+men lying on cots.  They had been brought out of the building and put in
+the sunshine. They were on the way to recovery; at least most of them
+were.  I sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was flanked on one
+of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and on another by the
+principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century structure with outdoor
+shrines snuggled up under its eaves.  Except for the chanting of the
+nuns and the braggadocio booming of a big cock-pigeon, which had flown
+down from the church tower to forage for spilt grain almost under my
+feet, the place was quiet.  It was so quiet that when a little column of
+men turned into the head of the street which wound past the front of the
+church and off to the left, I heard the measured tramping of their feet
+upon the stony roadway fully a minute before they came in sight.  I was
+wondering what that rhythmic thumping meant, when one of the nursing
+sisters came and closed the high wooden door at my back, shutting off
+the view of the wounded men.
+
+There appeared a little procession, headed by a priest in his robes and
+two altar-boys.  At the heels of these three were six soldiers bearing
+upon their shoulders a wooden box painted a glaring yellow; and so
+narrow was the box and so shallow-looking, that on the instant the
+thought came to me that the poor clay inclosed therein must feel cramped
+in such scant quarters.  Upon the top of the box, at its widest, highest
+point, rested a wreath of red flowers, a clumsy, spraddly wreath from
+which the red blossoms threatened to shake loose.  Even at a distance of
+some rods I could tell that a man's inexpert fingers must have fashioned
+it.
+
+Upon the shoulders of the bearers the box swayed and jolted.
+
+Following it came, first, three uniformed officers, two German nurses
+and two surgeons from another hospital, as I subsequently learned; and
+following them half a company of soldiers bearing their rifles and
+wearing side arms.  As the small cortege reached a point opposite us an
+officer snapped an order and everybody halted, and the gun-butts of the
+company came down with a smashing abruptness upon the cobbles.  At that
+moment two or three roughly clad civilians issued from a doorway near
+by.  Being Belgians they had small cause to love the Germans, but they
+stopped in their tracks and pulled off their caps.  To pay the tribute
+of a bared head to the dead, even to the unknown dead, is in these
+Catholic countries of Europe as much a part of a man's rule of conduct
+as his religion is.
+
+The priest who led the line turned my way inquiringly.  He did not have
+to wait long for what was to come, nor did I.  Another gate farther
+along in the nunnery wall opened and out came six more soldiers, bearing
+another of these narrow-shouldered coffins, and accompanied by a couple
+of nurses, an officer and an assistant surgeon.  At sight of them the
+soldiers brought their pieces up to a salute, and held the posture
+rigidly until the second dead man in his yellow box had joined the
+company of the first dead man in his.
+
+Just before this happened, though, one of the nurses of the nunnery
+hospital did a thing which I shall never forget.  She must have seen
+that the first coffin had flowers upon it, and in the same instant
+realized that the coffin in whose occupant she had a more direct
+interest was bare.  So she left the straggling line and came running
+back.  The wall streamed with woodbine, very glorious in its autumnal
+flamings.  She snatched a trailer of the red and yellow leaves down from
+where it clung, and as she hurried back her hands worked with magic
+haste, making it into a wreath.  She reached the second squad of bearers
+and put her wreath upon the lid of the box, and then sought her place
+with the other nurses.  The guns went up with a snap upon the shoulders
+of the company.  The soldiers' feet thudded down all together upon the
+stones, and with the priest reciting his office the procession passed
+out of sight, going toward the burial ground at the back of the town.
+Presently, when the shadows were thickening into gloom and the angelus
+bells were ringing in the church, I heard, a long way off, the rattle of
+the rifles as the soldiers fired goodnight volleys over the graves of
+their dead comrades.
+
+On the next day, at Hirson, which was another of our stopping points on
+the journey to the front, we saw the joint funeral of seven men leaving
+the hospital where they had died during the preceding twelve hours, and
+I shan't forget that picture either.  There was a vista bounded by a
+stretch of one of those unutterably bleak backways of a small and shabby
+French town.  The rutted street twisted along between small gray plaster
+houses, with ugly, unnecessary gable-ends, which faced the road at wrong
+angles.  Small groups of towns-people stood against the walls to watch.
+
+
+There was also a handful of idling soldiers who watched from the gateway
+of the house where they were billeted.
+
+Seven times the bearers entered the hospital door, and each time as they
+reappeared, bringing one of the narrow, gaudy, yellow boxes, the
+officers lined up at the door would salute and the soldiers in double
+lines at the opposite side of the road would present arms, and then, as
+the box was lifted upon the wagon waiting to receive it, would smash
+their guns down on the bouldered road with a crash.  When the job of
+bringing forth the dead was done the wagon stood loaded pretty nearly to
+capacity.  Four of the boxes rested crosswise upon the flat wagon-bed
+and the other three were racked lengthwise on top of them.  Here, too,
+was a priest in his robes, and here were two altar boys who straggled,
+so that as the procession started the priest was moved to break off his
+chanting long enough to chide his small attendants and wave them back
+into proper alignment.  With the officers, the nurses and the surgeons
+all marching afoot marched also three bearded civilians in frock coats,
+having the air about them of village dignitaries.  From their presence
+in such company we deduced that one of the seven silent travelers on the
+wagon must be a French soldier, or else that the Germans had seen fit to
+require the attendance of local functionaries at the burial of dead
+Germans.
+
+As the cortege--I suppose you might call it that--went by where I stood
+with my friends, I saw that upon the sides of the coffins names were
+lettered in big, straggly black letters.  I read two of the names--
+Werner was one, Vogel was the other.  Somehow I felt an acuter personal
+interest in Vogel and Werner than in the other five whose names I could
+not read.
+
+Wherever we stopped in Belgium or in France or in Germany these
+soldiers' funerals were things of daily, almost of hourly occurrence.
+And in Maubeuge on this evening, even though dusk had fallen, two of the
+inevitable yellow boxes, mounted upon a two-wheeled cart, were going to
+the burying ground.  We figured the cemetery men would fill the graves
+by lantern light; and knowing something of their hours of employment we
+imagined that with this job disposed of they would probably turn to and
+dig graves by night, making them ready against the needs of the
+following morning.  The new graves always were ready.  They were made in
+advance, and still there were rarely enough of them, no matter how long
+or how hard the diggers kept at their work.  At Aix-la-Chapelle, for
+example, in the principal cemetery the sexton's men dug twenty new
+graves every morning.  By evening there would be twenty shaped mounds of
+clay where the twenty holes had been.  The crop of the dead was the one
+sure crop upon which embattled Europe might count.  That harvest could
+not fail the warring nations, however scanty other yields might be.
+
+In the towns in occupied territory the cemeteries were the only actively
+and constantly busy spots to be found, except the hospitals.  Every
+schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed I think there can be no schoolhouse
+in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such a purpose.
+In their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses mighty well.
+We would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the dead coming out
+in boxes.  We would see how the blackboards, still scrawled over perhaps
+with the chalked sums of lessons which never were finished, now bore
+pasted-on charts dealing in nurses' and surgeons' cipher-manual, with
+the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on the mattresses beneath.
+We would see classrooms where plaster casts and globe maps and dusty
+textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to make room on desktops and
+shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical appliances.  We would see
+the rows of hooks intended originally for the caps and umbrellas of
+little people; but now from each hook dangled the ripped, bloodied
+garments of a soldier--gray for a German, brown-tan for an Englishman,
+blue-and-red for a Frenchman or a Belgian.  By the German rule a wounded
+man's uniform must be brought back with him from the place where he fell
+and kept handily near him, with tags on it, to prove its proper
+identity, and there it must stay until its owner needs it again--if ever
+he needs it again.
+
+We would see these things, and we would wonder if these schoolhouses
+could ever shake off the scents and the stains and the memories of these
+present grim visitations--wonder if children would ever frolic any more
+in the courtyards where the ambulances stood now with red drops
+trickling down from their beds upon the gravel.  But that, on our part,
+was mere morbidness born of the sights we saw.  Children forget even
+more quickly than their elders forget, and we knew, from our own
+experience, how quickly the populace of a French or Flemish community
+could rally back to a colorable counterfeit of their old sprightliness,
+once the immediate burdens of affliction and captivity had been lifted
+from off them.
+
+From a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals
+sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as I write this article.
+I can shut my eyes and visualize the German I saw in the little parish
+school building in the abandoned hamlet of Colligis near by the River
+Aisne.  He was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering from chest
+wounds.  He had been pierced through both lungs with a bullet, and to
+keep him from choking to death the attendants had tied him in a half
+erect posture.  A sort of hammock-like sling passed under his arms, and
+a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted fast to the hook.
+He swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting for the breath of
+life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his eyes; and he was
+too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies that swarmed upon
+his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing throat.  The flies
+dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with loathsome black dots;
+they literally masked his.  I preserve a memory which is just as vivid
+of certain things I saw in a big institution in Laon.  Although in
+German hands, and nominally under German control, the building was given
+over entirely to crippled and ailing French prisoners.  These patients
+were minded and fed by their own people and attended by captured French
+surgeons.  In our tour of the place I saw only two men wearing the
+German gray.  One was the armed sentry who stood at the gate to see that
+no recovering inmate slipped out, and the other was a German surgeon-
+general who was making his daily round of inspection of the hospitals
+and had brought us along with him. Of the native contingent the person
+who appeared to be in direct charge was a handsome, elderly lady,
+tenderly solicitous of the frowziest Turco in the wards and exquisitely
+polite, with a frozen politeness, to the German officer.  When he
+saluted her she bowed to him deeply and ceremoniously and silently.  I
+never thought until then that a bow could be so profoundly executed and
+yet so icily cold.  It was a lesson in congealed manners.
+
+As we were leaving the room a nun serving as a nurse hailed the German
+and told him one of her charges was threatening to die, not because of
+his wound, but because he had lost heart and believed himself to be
+dying.
+
+"Where is he?" asked the German.
+
+"Yonder," she said, indicating a bundled-up figure on a pallet near the
+door.  A drawn, hopeless face of a half-grown boy showed from the huddle
+of blankets.  The surgeon-general cast a quick look at the swathed form
+and then spoke in an undertone to a French regimental surgeon on duty in
+the room.  Together the two approached the lad.
+
+"My son," said the German to him in French, "I am told you do not feel
+so well to-day."
+
+The boy-soldier whispered an answer and waggled his head despondently.
+The German put his hand on the youth's forehead.
+
+"My son," he said, "listen to me.  You are not going to die--I promise
+you that you shall not die.  My colleague here"--he indicated the French
+doctor--"stands ready to make you the same promise.  If you won't
+believe a German, surely you will take your own countryman's
+professional word for it," and he smiled a little smile under his gray
+mustache.  "Between us we are going to make you well and send you, when
+this war is over, back to your mother.  But you must help us; you must
+help us by being brave and confident.  Is it not so, doctor?" he added,
+again addressing the French physician, and the Frenchman nodded to show
+it was so and sat down alongside the youngster to comfort him further.
+
+As we left the room the German surgeon turned, and looking round I saw
+that once again he saluted the patrician French lady, and this time as
+she bowed the ice was all melted from her bearing.  She must have
+witnessed the little byplay; perhaps she had a son of her own in
+service.  There were mighty few mothers in France last fall who did not
+have sons in service.
+
+Yet one of the few really humorous recollections of this war that I
+preserve had to do with a hospital too; but this hospital was in England
+and we visited it on our way home to America.  We went--two of us--in
+the company of Lord Northcliffe, down into Surrey, to spend a day with
+old Lord Roberts.  Within three weeks thereafter Lord Roberts was dead
+where no doubt he would have willed to die--at the front in France, with
+the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last moments by the
+Ghurkas and the Sikhs of his beloved Indian contingent.  But on this day
+of our visit to him we found him a hale, kindly gentleman of eighty-two
+who showed us his marvelous collection of firearms and Oriental relics
+and the field guns, all historic guns by the way, which he kept upon the
+terraces of his mansion house, and who told us, among other things, that
+in his opinion our own Stonewall Jackson was perhaps the greatest
+natural military genius the world had ever produced.  Leaving his house
+we stopped, on our return to London, at a hospital for soldiers in the
+grounds of Ascot Race Course scarcely two miles from Lord Roberts'
+place.  The refreshment booths and the other rooms at the back and
+underside of the five-shilling stand had been thrown together, except
+the barber's shop, which was being converted into an operating chamber;
+and, what with its tiled walls and high sloped ceiling and glass front,
+the place made a first-rate hospital.
+
+It contained beds for fifty men; but on this day there were less than
+twenty sick and crippled Tommies convalescing here.  They had been
+brought out of France, out of wet and cold and filth, with hurried
+dressings on their hurts; and now they were in this bright, sweet,
+wholesome place, with soft beds under them and clean linen on their
+bodies, and flowers and dainties on the tables that stood alongside
+them, and the gentlefolk of the neighborhood to mind them as volunteer
+nurses.
+
+There were professional nurses, of course; but, under them, the younger
+women of the wealthy families of this corner of Surrey were serving; and
+mighty pretty they all looked, too, in their crisp blue-and-white
+uniforms, with their arm badges and their caps, and their big aprons
+buttoned round their slim, athletic young bodies.  I judge there were
+about three amateur nurses to each patient.  Yet you could not rightly
+call them amateurs either; each of them had taken a short course in
+nursing, it seemed, and was amply competent to perform many of the
+duties a regular nurse must know.  Lady Aileen Roberts was with us
+during our tour of the hospital.  As a daily visitor and patroness she
+spent much of her time here and she knew most of the inmates by name.
+She halted alongside one bed to ask its occupant how he felt.  He had
+been returned from the front suffering from pneumonia.
+
+He was an Irishman.  Before he answered her he cast a quick look about
+the long hall. Afternoon tea was just being served, consisting, besides
+tea, of homemade strawberry jam and lettuce sandwiches made of crisp
+fresh bread, with plenty of butter; and certain elderly ladies had just
+arrived, bringing with them, among other contributions, sheaves of
+flowers and a dogcart loaded with hothouse fruit and a dozen loaves of
+plumcake, which last were still hot from the oven and which radiated a
+mouth-watering aroma as a footman bore them in behind his mistress.  The
+patient looked at all these and he sniffed; and a grin split his face
+and an Irish twinkle came into his eyes.
+
+"Thank you, me lady, for askin'," he said; "but I'm very much afeared
+I'm gettin' better."
+
+We might safely assume that the hospitals and the graveyard of Maubeuge
+would be busy places that evening, thereby offering strong contrasts to
+the rest of the town.  But I should add that we found two other busy
+spots, too: the railroad station--where the trains bringing wounded men
+continually shuttled past--and the house where the commandant of the
+garrison had his headquarters.  In the latter place, as guests of Major
+von Abercron, we met at dinner that night and again after dinner a
+strangely mixed company.  We met many officers and the pretty American
+wife of an officer, Frau Elsie von, Heinrich, late of Jersey City, who
+had made an adventurous trip in a motor ambulance from Germany to see
+her husband before he went to the front, and who sent regards by us to
+scores of people in her old home whose names I have forgotten.  We met
+also a civilian guest of the commandant, who introduced himself as
+August Blankhertz and who turned out to be a distinguished big-game
+hunter and gentleman aeronaut.  With Major von Abercron for a mate he
+sailed from St. Louis in the great balloon race for the James Gordon
+Bennett Cup.  They came down in the Canadian woods and nearly died of
+hunger and exposure before they found a lumber camp.  Their balloon was
+called the Germania.  There was another civilian, a member of the German
+secret-service staff, wearing the Norfolk jacket and the green Alpine
+hat and on a cord about his neck the big gold token of authority which
+invariably mark a representative of this branch of the German espionage
+bureau; and he was wearing likewise that transparent air of mystery
+which seemed always to go with the followers of his ingenious
+profession.
+
+During the evening the mayor of Maubeuge came, a bearded, melancholy
+gentleman, to confer with the commandant regarding a clash between a
+German under-officer and a household of his constituents.  Orderlies and
+attendants bustled in and out, and somebody played Viennese waltz songs
+on a piano, and altogether there was quite a gay little party in the
+parlor of this handsome house which the Germans had commandeered for the
+use of their garrison staff.
+
+At early bedtime, when we stepped out of the door of the lit-up mansion
+into the street, it was as though we had stepped into a far-off country.
+Except for the tramp of a sentry's hobbed boots over the sidewalks and
+the challenging call of another sentry round the corner the town was as
+silent as a town of tombs.  All the people who remained in this place
+had closed their forlorn shops where barren shelves and emptied
+showcases testified to the state of trade; and they had shut themselves
+up in their houses away from sight of the invaders.  We could guess what
+their thoughts must be.  Their industries were paralyzed, and their
+liberties were curtailed, and every other house was a breached and
+worthless shell.  Among ourselves we debated as we walked along to the
+squalid tavern where we had been quartered, which of the spectacles we
+had that day seen most fitly typified the fruitage of war--the
+shattered, haunted forts lying now in the moonlight beyond the town, or
+the brooding conquered, half-destroyed town itself.  I guess, if it
+comes to that, they both typified it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 14
+
+The Red Glutton
+
+
+As we went along next day through the town of Maubeuge we heard singing;
+and singing was a most rare thing to be hearing in this town.  In a
+country where no one smiles any more who belongs in that country,
+singing is not a thing which you would naturally expect to hear.  So we
+turned off of our appointed route.
+
+There was a small wine shop at the prow of a triangle of narrow streets.
+It had been a wine shop.  It was now a beer shop.  There had been a
+French proprietor; he had a German partner now.  It had been only a few
+weeks--you could not as yet measure the interval of time in terms of
+months--since the Germans came and sat themselves down before Maubeuge
+and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter earthquakes and
+marched in and took it.  It had been only these few weeks; but already
+the Germanizing brand of the conqueror was seared deep in the galled
+flanks of this typically French community.  The town-hall clock was made
+to tick German time, which varied by an even hour from French time.
+Tacked upon the door of the little cafe where we ate our meals was a
+card setting forth, with painful German particularity, the tariff which
+might properly be charged for food and for lodging and drink and what
+not; and it was done in German-Gothic script, all very angular and
+precise; and it was signed by His Excellency, the German commandant; and
+its prices were predicated on German logic and the estimated depth of a
+German wallet.  You might read a newspaper printed in German characters,
+if so minded; but none printed in French, whether so minded or not.
+
+So when we entered in at the door of the little French wine shop where
+the three streets met, to find out who within had heart of grace to sing
+'O Strassburg, O Strassburg', so lustily, lo and behold, it had been
+magically transformed into a German beer shop.  It was, as we presently
+learned, the only beer shop in all of Maubeuge, and the reason for that
+was this: No sooner had the Germans cleared and opened the roads back
+across Belgium to their own frontiers than an enterprising tradesman of
+the Rhein country, who somehow had escaped military service, loaded many
+kegs of good German beer upon trucks and brought his precious cargoes
+overland a hundred miles and more southward. Certainly he could not have
+moved the lager caravan without the consent and aid of the Berlin war
+office.  For all I know to the contrary he may have been financed in
+that competent quarter.  That same morning I had seen a field weather
+station, mounted on an automobile, standing in front of our lodging
+place just off the square.  It was going to the front to make and
+compile meteorological reports.  A general staff who provided weather
+offices on wheels and printing offices on wheels--this last for the
+setting up and striking off of small proclamations and orders--might
+very well have bethought themselves that the soldier in the field would
+be all the fitter for the job before him if stayed with the familiar
+malts of the Vaterland.  Believe me, I wouldn't put it past them.
+
+Anyway, having safely reached Maubeuge, the far-seeing Rheinishman
+effected a working understanding with a native publican, which was
+probably a good thing for both, seeing that one had a stock of goods and
+a ready-made trade but no place to set up business, and that the other
+owned a shop, but had lost his trade and his stock-in-trade likewise.
+These two, the little, affable German and the tall, grave Frenchman,
+stood now behind their counter drawing off mugs of Pilsener as fast as
+their four hands could move.  Their patrons, their most vocal and
+boisterous patrons, were a company of musketeers who had marched in from
+the north that afternoon.  As a rule the new levies went down into
+France on troop trains, but this company was part of a draft which for
+some reason came afoot.
+
+Without exception they were young men, husky and hearty and inspired
+with a beefish joviality at having found a place where they could ease
+their feet, and rest their legs, and slake their week-old thirst upon
+their own soothing brews.  Being German they expressed their
+gratefulness in song.  We had difficulty getting into the place, so
+completely was it filled.  Men sat in the window ledges, and in the few
+chairs that were available, and even in the fireplace, and on the ends
+of the bar, clunking their heels against the wooden baseboards.  The
+others stood in such close order they could hardly clear their elbows to
+lift their glasses.  The air was choky with a blended smell derived from
+dust and worn boot leather and spilt essences of hops and healthy,
+unwashed, sweaty bodies.  On a chair in a corner stood a tall, tired and
+happy youth who beat time for the singing with an empty mug and between
+beats nourished himself on drafts from a filled mug which he held in his
+other hand.  With us was a German officer.  He was a captain of reserves
+and a person of considerable wealth.  He shoved his way to the bar and
+laid down upon its sloppy surface two gold coins and said something to a
+petty officer who was directing the distribution of the refreshments.
+
+The noncom.  hammered for silence and, when he got it, announced that
+the Herr Hauptmann had donated twenty marks' worth of beer, all present
+being invited to cooperate in drinking it up, which they did, but first
+gave three cheers for the captain and three more for his American
+friends and afterward, while the replenished mugs radiated in crockery
+waves from the bar to the back walls, sang for us a song which, so far
+as the air was concerned, sounded amazingly like unto Every Little
+Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own.  Their weariness was quite fallen
+away from them; they were like schoolboys on a frolic.  Indeed, I think
+a good many of them were schoolboys.
+
+As we came out a private who stood in the doorway spoke to us in fair
+English.  He had never been in America, but he had a brother living in
+East St. Louis and he wanted to know if any of us knew his brother.
+This was a common experience with us.  Every third German soldier we met
+had a brother or a sister or somebody in America.  This soldier could
+not have been more than eighteen years; the down on his cheeks was like
+corn silk.  He told us he and his comrades were very glad to be going
+forward where there would be fighting.  They had had no luck yet.  There
+had been no fighting where they had been.  I remembered afterward that
+luck was the word he used.
+
+We went back to the main street and for a distance the roar of their
+volleying chorus followed us.  Men and women stood at the doors of the
+houses along the way.  They were silent and idle.  Idleness and silence
+seemed always to have fallen as grim legacies upon the civilian populace
+of these captured towns; but the look upon their faces as they listened
+to the soldiers' voices was not hard to read.  Their town was pierced by
+cannonballs where it was not scarified with fire; there was sorrow and
+the abundant cause for sorrow in every house; commerce was dead and
+credit was killed; and round the next turning their enemy sang his
+drinking song.  I judge that the thrifty Frenchman who went partner with
+the German stranger in the beer traffic lost popularity that day among
+his fellow townsmen.
+
+We were bound for the railway station, which the Germans already had
+rechristened Bahnhof.  Word had been brought to us that trains of
+wounded men and prisoners were due in the course of the afternoon from
+the front, and more especially from the right wing; and in this prospect
+we scented a story to be written.  To reach the station we crossed the
+river Sambre, over a damaged bridge, and passed beneath the arched
+passageway of the citadel which the great Vauban built for the still
+greater Louis XIV, thinking, no doubt, when he built it, that it would
+always be potent to keep out any foe, however strong.  Next to its
+stupid massiveness what most impressed us this day was its utter
+uselessness as a protection.  The station stood just beyond the walls,
+with a park at one side of it, but the park had become a timber
+deadfall.  At the approach of the enemy hundreds of splendid trees had
+been felled to clear the way for gunfire from the inner defenses in the
+event that the Germans got by the outer circle of fortresses.  After the
+Germans took the forts, though, the town surrendered, so all this
+destruction had been futile.  There were acres of ragged stumps and,
+between the stumps, jungles of overlapping trunks and interlacing boughs
+from which the dead and dying leaves shook off in showers.  One of our
+party, who knew something of forestry, estimated that these trees were
+about forty years old.
+
+"I suppose," he added speculatively, "that when this war ends these
+people will replant their trees.  Then in another forty years or so
+another war will come and they will chop them all down again.  On the
+whole I'm rather glad I don't live on this continent."
+
+The trains which were expected had not begun to arrive yet, so with two
+companions I sat on a bench at the back of the station, waiting.  Facing
+us was a line of houses.  One, the corner house, was a big black char.
+It had caught fire during the shelling and burned quite down.  Its
+neighbors were intact, except for shattered chimneys and smashed doors
+and riddled windows.  The concussion of a big gunfire had shivered every
+window in this quarter of town.  There being no sufficient stock of
+glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing in
+fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched the
+holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near by.
+Of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum them up:
+Few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there was any fresh
+glass to buy, and the local glaziers--such of them as survived--would be
+serving the colors.  All France had gone to war and at this time of
+writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams of wounded and
+prisoners.
+
+These ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave
+the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through
+narrow eye slits.  The railroad station was windowless, too, like all
+the buildings round about, but nobody had closed the openings here, and
+it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a North
+European fall searched through it.
+
+In this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen.
+Even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be
+untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them.  A
+hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick
+and crane were hoisting captured French field guns upon flat cars to be
+taken to Berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of
+the stay-at-homes.  A row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were
+ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation.  Except for the
+agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the
+place where we sat was pretty quiet.  There were a million flies, and
+there seemed to be a billion.  You wouldn't have thought, unless you had
+been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the
+world.  By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe
+of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the
+track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin.  Even after a night
+of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday--as thick and as
+clinging and as nasty.  Go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter
+what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.
+
+As I sit and look back on what I myself have seen of it, this war seems
+to me to have been not so much a sight as a stench.  Everything which
+makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed.  What
+it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is a
+vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.
+
+The smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in
+sickening profusion.
+
+I call it a railroad station, although it had lost its functions as such
+weeks before.  The only trains which ran now were run by the Germans for
+strictly German purposes, and so the station had become a victualing
+point for troops going south to the fighting and a way hospital for sick
+and wounded coming back from the fighting.  What, in better days than
+these, had been the lunch room was a place for the redressing of hurts.
+Its high counters, which once held sandwiches and tarts and wine
+bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton and rolls of
+lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials.  The ticket booth
+was an improvised pharmacy.  Spare medical supplies filled the room
+where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of travelers
+coming out of Belgium into France.  Just beyond the platform a wooden
+booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of rough
+planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their soiled gray
+uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews--always stews--and brewed
+so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who would need
+it.  The stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too.  So they
+cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan or clean a
+spoon.
+
+At our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no
+passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent it
+was a sort of rest room for the Red Cross men, who mostly were Germans,
+but with a few captured Frenchmen among them, still wearing their French
+uniforms.  There were three or four French military surgeons--prisoners,
+to be sure, but going and coming pretty much as they pleased. The tacit
+arrangement was that the Germans should succor Germans and that the
+Frenchmen should minister to their own disabled countrymen among the
+prisoners going north, but in a time of stress--and that meant every
+time a train came in from the south or west--both nationalities mingled
+together and served, without regard for the color of the coat worn by
+those whom they served.
+
+Probably from the day it was put up this station had never been really
+and entirely clean. Judged by American standards Continental railway
+stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal.  Now
+that conditions were anything but normal, this Maubeuge station was
+incredibly and incurably filthy.  No doubt the German nursing sisters
+who were brought here tried at first, with their German love for
+orderliness, to keep the interior reasonably tidy; but they had been
+swamped by more important tasks. For two weeks now the wounded had been
+passing through by the thousands and the tens of thousands daily.  So
+between trains the women dropped into chairs or down upon cots and took
+their rest in snatches.  But their fingers didn't reSt. Always their
+hands were busy with the making of bandages and the fluffing of lint.
+
+By bits I learned something about three of the women who served on the
+so-called day shift, which meant that they worked from early morning
+until long after midnight.  One was a titled woman who had volunteered
+for this duty.  She was beyond middle age, plainly in poor health
+herself and everlastingly on the verge of collapse from weakness and
+exhaustion.  Her will kept her on her feet.  The second was a
+professional nurse from one of the university towns--from Bonn, I think.
+She called herself Sister Bartholomew, for the German nurses who go to
+war take other names than their own, just as nuns do. She was a
+beautiful woman, tall and strong and round-faced, with big, fine gray
+eyes. Her energy had no limits.  She ran rather than walked.  She had a
+smile for every maimed man who was brought to her, but when the man had
+been treated, and had limped away or had been carried away, I saw her
+often wringing her hands and sobbing over the utter horror of it all.
+Then another sufferer would appear and she would wipe the tears off her
+cheeks and get to work again.  The third--so an assistant surgeon
+confided to us--was the mistress of an officer at the front, a
+prostitute of the Berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work when
+her lover went to the front.  She Was a tall, dark, handsome girl, who
+looked to be more Spaniard than German, and she was graceful and lithe
+even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that she wore.
+She was less deft than either of her associates but very willing and
+eager.  As between the three--the noblewoman, the working woman and the
+woman of the street--the medical officials in charge made no distinction
+whatsoever.  Why should they? In this sisterhood of mercy they all three
+stood upon the same common ground.  I never knew that slop jars were
+noble things until I saw women in these military lazarets bearing them
+in their arms; then to me they became as altar vessels.
+
+Lacking women to do it, the head surgeon had intrusted the task of
+clearing away the dirt to certain men.  A sorry job they made of it.
+For accumulated nastiness that waiting room was an Augean stable and the
+two soldiers who dawdled about in it with brooms lacked woefully in the
+qualities of Hercules.  Putting a broom in a man's hands is the best
+argument in favor of woman's suffrage that I know of, anyhow.  A third
+man who helped at chores in the transformed lunch room had gathered up
+and piled together in a heap upon the ground near us a bushel or so of
+used bandages--grim reminders left behind after the last train went by--
+and he had touched a match to the heap in an effort to get rid of it by
+fire.  By reason of what was upon them the clothes burned slowly,
+sending up a smudge of acrid smoke to mingle with smells of carbolic
+acid and iodoform, and the scent of boiling food, and of things
+infinitely less pleasant than these.
+
+Presently a train rolled in and we crossed through the building to the
+trackside to watch what would follow.  Already we had seen a sufficiency
+of such trains; we knew before it came what it would be like: In front
+the dumpy locomotive, with a soldier engineer in the cab; then two or
+three box cars of prisoners, with the doors locked and armed guards
+riding upon the roofs; then two or three shabby, misused passenger
+coaches, containing injured officers and sometimes injured common
+soldiers, too; and then, stretching off down the rails, a long string of
+box cars, each of which would be bedded with straw and would contain for
+furniture a few rough wooden benches ranging from side to side.  And
+each car would contain ten or fifteen or twenty, or even a greater
+number, of sick and crippled men.
+
+Those who could sit were upon the hard benches, elbow to elbow, packed
+snugly in. Those who were too weak to sit sprawled upon the straw and
+often had barely room in which to turn over, so closely were they
+bestowed.  It had been days since they had started back from the field
+hospitals where they had had their first-aid treatment.  They had moved
+by sluggish stages with long halts in between.  Always the wounded must
+wait upon the sidings while the troop trains from home sped down the
+cleared main line to the smoking front; that was the merciless but
+necessary rule.  The man who got himself crippled became an obstacle to
+further progress, a drag upon the wheels of the machine; whereas the man
+who was yet whole and fit was the man whom the generals wanted.  So the
+fresh grist for the mill, the raw material, if you will, was expedited
+upon its way to the hoppers; that which already had been ground up was
+relatively of the smallest consequence.
+
+Because of this law, which might not be broken or amended, these wounded
+men would, perforce, spend several days aboard train before they could
+expect to reach the base hospitals upon German soil, Maubeuge being at
+considerably less than midway of the distance between starting point and
+probable destination.  Altogether the trip might last a week or even two
+weeks--a trip that ordinarily would have lasted less than twelve hours.
+Through it these men, who were messed and mangled in every imaginable
+fashion, would wallow in the dirty matted straw, with nothing except
+that thin layer of covering between them and the car floors that jolted
+and jerked beneath them.  We knew it and they knew it, and there was
+nothing to be done.  Their wounds would fester and be hot with fever.
+Their clotted bandages would clot still more and grow stiffer and harder
+with each dragging hour.  Those who lacked overcoats and blankets--and
+some there were who lacked both--would half freeze at night.  For food
+they would have slops dished up for them at such stopping places as this
+present one, and they would slake their thirst on water drawn from
+contaminated wayside wells and be glad of the chance. Gangrene would
+come, and blood poison, and all manner of corruption.  Tetanus would
+assuredly claim its toll.  Indeed, these horrors were already at work
+among them.  I do not tell it to sicken my reader, but because I think I
+should tell it that he may have a fuller conception of what this
+fashionable institution of war means--we could smell this train as we
+could smell all the trains which followed after it, when it was yet
+fifty yards away from us.
+
+Be it remembered, furthermore, that no surgeon accompanied this
+afflicted living freightage, that not even a qualified nurse traveled
+with it.  According to the classifying processes of those in authority
+on the battle lines these men were lightly wounded men, and it was
+presumed that while en route they would be competent to minister to
+themselves and to one another.  Under the grading system employed by the
+chief surgeons a man, who was still all in one piece and who probably
+would not break apart in transit, was designated as being lightly
+wounded.  This statement is no attempt upon my part to indulge in levity
+concerning the most frightful situation I have encountered in nearly
+twenty years of active newspaper work; it is the sober, unexaggerated
+truth.
+
+And so these lightly wounded men--men with their jaws shot away, men
+with holes in their breasts and their abdomens, men with their spine
+tips splintered, men with their arms and legs broken, men with their
+hands and feet shredded by shrapnel, men with their scalps ripped open,
+men with their noses and their ears and their fingers and toes gone, men
+jarred to the very marrow of their bones by explosives--these men, for
+whom ordinarily soft beds would have been provided and expert care and
+special food, came trundling up alongside that noisome station; and,
+through the door openings from where they were housed like dumb beasts,
+they looked out at us with the glazed eyes of dumb suffering beasts.
+
+As the little toy-like European cars halted, bumping together hard,
+orderlies went running down the train bearing buckets of soup, and of
+coffee and of drinking water, and loaves of the heavy, dark German
+bread.  Behind them went other men--bull-necked strong men picked for
+this job because of their strength.  Their task was to bring back in
+their arms or upon their shoulders such men as were past walking.  There
+were no stretchers. There was no time for stretchers.  Behind this train
+would be another one just like it and behind that one, another, and so
+on down an eighty-mile stretch of dolorous way.  And this, mind you, was
+but one of three lines carrying out of France and Belgium into Germany
+victims of the war to be made well again in order that they might return
+and once more be fed as tidbits into the maw of that war; it was but one
+of a dozen or more such streams, threading back from as many battle
+zones to the countries engaged in this wide and ardent scheme of mutual
+extermination.
+
+Half a minute after the train stopped a procession was moving toward us,
+made up of men who had wriggled down or who had been eased down out of
+the cars, and who were coming to the converted buffet room for help.
+Mostly they came afoot, sometimes holding on to one another for mutual
+support.  Perhaps one in five was borne bodily by an orderly.  He might
+be hunched in the orderly's arms like a weary child, or he might be
+traveling upon the orderly's back, pack-fashion, with his arms gripped
+about the bearer's neck; and then, in such a case, the pair of them,
+with the white hollow face of the wounded man nodding above the sweated
+red face of the other, became a monstrosity with two heads and one pair
+of legs.
+
+Here, advancing toward us with the gait of a doddering grandsire, would
+be a boy in his teens, bent double and clutching his middle with both
+hands.  Here would be a man whose hand had been smashed, and from beyond
+the rude swathings of cotton his fingers protruded stiffly and were so
+congested and swollen they looked like fat red plantains.  Here was a
+man whose feet were damaged.  He had a crutch made of a spade handle.
+Next would be a man with a hole in his neck, and the bandages had pulled
+away from about his throat, showing the raw inflamed hole.  In this
+parade I saw a French infantryman aided along by a captured Zouave on
+one side and on the other by a German sentry who swung his loaded
+carbine in his free hand.  Behind them I saw an awful nightmare of a
+man--a man whose face and bare cropped head and hands and shoes were
+all of a livid, poisonous, green cast. A shell of some new and
+particularly devilish variety had burst near him and the fumes which it
+generated in bursting had dyed him green.  Every man would have, tied
+about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the German field-doctor's
+card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place where he had
+sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be discolored
+with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked that the
+harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff, brownish-
+red streakings.
+
+In at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the
+wounded men dropped on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and
+tables and cots--anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up or
+stretch out.  And then the overworked surgeons, French and German, and
+the German nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall to.
+There was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might have
+spared the sufferers some measure of their agony.  It was cut away the
+old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what was
+beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon the bare and shrinking
+tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done
+where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a
+strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be
+fed--providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch.  The
+first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that
+was how fast the work went forward.
+
+One special horror was spared: The patients made no outcry.  They
+gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked out.
+Indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where I saw wounded
+men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which fiction
+always has invested such scenes.  Those newly struck seemed stunned into
+silence; those who had had time to recover from the first shock of being
+struck appeared buoyed and sustained by a stoic quality which lifted
+them, mute and calm, above the call of tortured nerves and torn flesh.
+Those who were delirious might call out; those who were conscious locked
+their lips and were steadfast.  In all our experience I came upon just
+two men in their senses who gave way at all.  One was a boy of nineteen
+or twenty, in a field hospital near Rheims, whose kneecap had been
+smashed.  He sat up on his bed, rocking his body and whimpering
+fretfully like an infant.  He had been doing that for days, a nurse told
+us, but whether he whimpered because of his suffering or at the thought
+of going through life with a stiffened leg she did not know. The other
+was here at Maubeuge.  I helped hold his right arm steady while a
+surgeon took the bandages off his hand.  When the wrapping came away a
+shattered finger came with it--it had rotted off, if you care to know
+that detail--and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping,
+animal-like sounds.  Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than
+the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne.  He had
+been bearing it for days.
+
+I particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first
+train.  He was a young giant.  For certain the old father of Frederick
+the Great would have had him in his regiment of Grenadier Guards.  Well,
+for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family
+now.  He hobbled in under his own motive power and leaned against the
+wall until the first flurry was over.  Then, at a nod from one of the
+shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare wooden table
+which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief for his
+leg--which leg, I recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike arrangement
+of plaited straw.  The surgeon took off the straw and the packing
+beneath it.  The giant had a hole right through his knee, from side to
+side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and purplish-
+black.  So the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with iodine; the
+youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with his arms crossed
+on his wide breast. I stood right by him, looking into his face, and he
+didn't so much as bat an eyelid.  But he didn't offer to get up when the
+surgeon was done with treating him.  He turned laboriously over on his
+face, pulling his shirt free from his body as he did so, and then we saw
+that he had a long, infected gash from a glancing bullet across the
+small of his back.  He had been lying on one angry wound while the other
+was redressed.  You marveled, not that he had endured it without
+blenching, but that he had endured it at all.
+
+The train stayed with us perhaps half an hour, and in that half hour at
+least a hundred men must have had treatment of sorts.  A signal sounded
+and the orderlies lifted up the few wasted specters who still remained
+and toted them out.  Almost the last man to be borne away was injured in
+both legs; an orderly carried him in his arms.  Seeing the need of haste
+the orderly sought to heave his burden aboard the nearest car.  The men
+in that car protested; already their space was overcrowded.  So the
+patient orderly staggered down the train until he found the crippled
+soldier's rightful place and thrust him into the straw just as the
+wheels began to turn.  As the cars, gathering speed, rolled by us we
+could see that nearly all the travelers were feeding themselves from
+pannikins of the bull-meat stew.  Wrappings on their hands and sometimes
+about their faces made them doubly awkward, and the hot tallowy mess
+spilt in spattering streams upon them and upon the straw under them.
+
+They were on their way.  At the end of another twenty-four hour stretch
+they might have traveled fifty or sixty or even seventy miles.  The
+place they left behind them was in worse case than before.  Grease
+spattered the earth; the floor of the buffet room was ankle deep,
+literally, in discarded bandages and blood-stiffened cotton; and the
+nurses and the doctors and the helpers dropped down in the midst of it
+all to snatch a few precious minutes of rest before the next creaking
+caravan of misery arrived.  There was no need to tell them of its
+coming; they knew.  All through that afternoon and night, and through
+the next day and night, and through the half of the third day that we
+stayed on in Maubeuge, the trains came back.  They came ten minutes
+apart, twenty minutes apart, an hour apart, but rarely more than an hour
+would elapse between trains.  And this traffic in marred and mutilated
+humanity had been going on for four weeks and would go on for nobody
+knew how many weeks more.
+
+When the train had gone out of sight beyond the first turn to the
+eastward I spoke to the head surgeon of the German contingent--a broad,
+bearded, middle-aged man who sat on a baggage truck while an orderly
+poured a mixture of water and antiseptics over his soiled hands.
+
+"A lot of those poor devils will die?" I suggested.
+
+"Less than three per cent of those who get back to the base hospitals
+will die," he said with a snap of his jaw, as though challenging me to
+doubt the statement.  "That is the wonder of this war--that so many are
+killed in the fighting and that so few die who get back out of it alive.
+These modern scientific bullets, these civilized bullets"--he laughed in
+self-derision at the use of the word--"they are cruel and yet they are
+merciful too.  If they do not kill you outright they have a little way,
+somehow, of not killing you at all."
+
+"But the bayonet wounds and the saber wounds?" I said.  "How about
+them?"
+
+"I have been here since the very first," he said; "since the day after
+our troops took this town, and God knows how many thousands of wounded
+men--Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turcos, some Belgians--have passed
+through my hands; but as yet I have to see a man who has been wounded by
+a saber or a lance.  I saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day
+before.  The man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his
+side.  Shrapnel wounds? Yes.  Wounds from fragments of bombs? Again,
+yes. Bullet wounds? I can't tell you how many of those I have seen, but
+surely many thousands.  But no bayonet wounds.  This is a war of hot
+lead, not of cold steel.  I read of these bayonet charges, but I do not
+believe that many such stories are true."
+
+I didn't believe it either.
+
+The train which followed after the first, coming up out of France,
+furnished for us much the same sights the first one had furnished, and
+so, with some slight variations, did the third train and the fourth and
+all the rest of them.  The station became a sty where before it had been
+a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and
+strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting
+room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at
+the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors
+looked as though there had been a snowstorm.
+
+A train came, whose occupants were nearly all wounded by shrapnel.
+Wounds of the head, the face and the neck abounded among these men--for
+the shells, exploding in the air above where they crouched in their
+trenches, had bespattered them with iron pebbles.  Each individual
+picture of! suffering recurred with such monotonous and regular
+frequency that after an hour or so it took something out of the common
+run--an especially vivid splash of daubed and crimson horror--to quicken
+our imaginations and make us fetch out our note books.  I recall a young
+lieutenant of Uhlans who had been wounded in the breast by fragments of
+a grenade, which likewise had smashed in several of his ribs.  He
+proudly fingered his newly acquired Iron Cross while the surgeon relaced
+his battered torso with strips of gauze.  Afterward he asked me for a
+cigar, providing I had one to spare, saying he had not tasted tobacco
+for a week and was perishing for a smoke.  We began to take note then
+how the wounded men watched us as we puffed at our cigars, and we
+realized they were dumbly envying us each mouthful of smoke.  So we sent
+our chauffeur to the public market with orders to buy all the cigars he
+could find on sale there.  He presently returned with the front and rear
+seats of the automobile piled high with bundled sheaves of the brown
+weed--you can get an astonishingly vast number of those domestic French
+cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in American money--and we
+turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse on condition that, until
+the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to every hurt soldier who
+might crave one, regardless of his nationality.  She cried as she
+thanked us for the small charity.
+
+"We can feed them--yes," she said, "but we have nothing to give them to
+smoke, and it is very hard on them."
+
+A little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of French
+prisoners and one carload of English.  Among the Frenchmen were many
+Alpine Rangers, so called--the first men we had seen of this wing of the
+service--and by reason of their dark blue uniforms and their flat blue
+caps they looked more like sailors than soldiers.  At first we took them
+for sailors.  There were thirty-four of the Englishmen, being all that
+were left of a company of the West Yorkshire Regiment of infantry.
+Confinement for days in a bare box car, with not even water to wash
+their faces and hands in, had not altogether robbed them of a certain
+trim alertness which seems to belong to the British fighting man.  Their
+puttees were snugly reefed about their shanks and their khaki tunics
+buttoned up to their throats.
+
+We talked with them.  They wanted to know if they had reached Germany
+yet, and when we told them that they were not out of France and had all
+of Belgium still to traverse, they groaned their dismay in chorus.
+
+"We've 'ad a very 'ard time of it, sir," said a spokesman, who wore
+sergeant's stripes on his sleeves and who told us he came from
+Sheffield.  "Seventeen 'ours we were in the trench, under fire all the
+time, with water up to our middles and nothing to eat.  We were 'olding
+the center and when the Frenchies fell back they didn't give our chaps
+no warning, and pretty soon the Dutchmen they 'ad us flanked both sides
+and we 'ad to quit.  But we didn't quit until we'd lost all but one of
+our officers and a good 'alf of our men."
+
+"Where was this?" one of us asked.
+
+"Don't know, sir," he said.  "It's a blooming funny war.  You never
+knows the name of the place where you're fighting at, unless you 'ears
+it by chance."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"Could you tell us, sir, 'ow's the war going? Are we giving the Germans
+a proper 'iding all along the line?"
+
+We inquired regarding their treatment.  They didn't particularly fancy
+the food--narsty slop, the sergeant called it--although it was
+reasonably plentiful; and, being true Englishmen, they sorely missed
+their tea.  Then, too, on the night before their overcoats had been
+taken from them and no explanations vouchsafed.
+
+"We could 'ave done with them," said the speaker bitterly; "pretty cold
+it was in this 'ere car.  And what with winter coming on and everything
+I call it a bit thick to be taking our overcoats off of us."
+
+We went and asked a German officer who had the convoy in charge the
+reason for this, and he said the overcoats of all the uninjured men,
+soldiers as well as prisoners, had been confiscated to furnish coverings
+for such of the wounded as lacked blankets.  Still, I observed that the
+guards for the train had their overcoats.  So I do not vouch for the
+accuracy of his explanation.
+
+It was getting late in the afternoon and the fifth train to pull in from
+the south since our advent on the spot--or possibly it was the sixth--
+had just halted when, from the opposite direction, a troop-train, long
+and heavy, panted into sight and stopped on the far track while the men
+aboard it got an early supper of hot victuals.  We crossed over to have
+a look at the new arrivals.
+
+It was a long train, drawn by one locomotive and shoved by another, and
+it included in its length a string of flat cars upon which were lashed
+many field pieces, and commandeered automobiles, and even some family
+carriages, not to mention baggage wagons and cook wagons and supply
+wagons.  For a wonder, the coaches in which the troops rode were new,
+smart coaches, seemingly just out of the builders' hands.  They were
+mainly first and second class coaches, varnished outside and equipped
+with upholstered compartments where the troopers took their luxurious
+ease.  Following the German fashion, the soldiers had decorated each car
+with field flowers and sheaves of wheat and boughs of trees, and even
+with long paper streamers of red and white and black.  Also, the artists
+and wags of the detachment had been busy with colored chalks. There was
+displayed on one car a lively crayon picture of a very fierce,
+two-tailed Bavarian lion eating up his enemies--a nation at a bite.
+Another car bore a menu:
+
+Russian caviar
+
+Servian rice meat English roast beef
+
+Belgian ragout French pastry
+
+Upon this same car was lettered a bit of crude verse, which, as we had
+come to know, was a favorite with the German private.  By my poor
+translation it ran somewhat as follows:
+
+For the Slav, a kick we have,
+And for the Jap a slap;
+The Briton too--we'll beat him blue,
+And knock the Frenchman flat.
+
+
+Altogether the train had quite the holidaying air about it and the men
+who traveled on it had the same spirit too.  They were Bavarians--all
+new troops, and nearly all young fellows.  Their accouterments were
+bright and their uniforms almost unsoiled, and I saw that each man
+carried in his right boot top the long, ugly-looking dirk-knife that the
+Bavarian foot-soldier fancies.  The Germans always showed heat when they
+found a big service clasp-knife hung about a captured Englishman's neck
+on a lanyard, calling it a barbarous weapon because of the length of the
+blade and long sharp brad-awl which folded into a slot at the back of the
+handle; but an equally grim bit of cutlery in a Bavarian's bootleg
+seemed to them an entirely proper tool for a soldier to be carrying.
+
+The troops--there must have been a full battalion of them--piled off the
+coaches to exercise their legs.  They skylarked about on the earth, and
+sang and danced, and were too full of coltish spirits to eat the rations
+that had been brought from the kitchen for their consumption.  Seeing
+our cameras, a lieutenant who spoke English came up to invite us to make
+a photograph of him and his men, with their bedecked car for a
+background.  He had been ill, he said, since the outbreak of
+hostilities, which explained why he was just now getting his first taste
+of active campaigning service.
+
+"Wait," he said vaingloriously, "just wait until we get at the damned
+British.  Some one else may have the Frenchmen--we want to get our hands
+on the Englishmen.  Do you know what my men say? They say they are glad
+for once in their lives to enjoy a fight where the policemen won't
+interfere and spoil the sport.  That's the Bavarian for you--the
+Prussian is best at drill, but the Bavarian is the best fighter in the
+whole world.  Only let us see the enemy--that is all we ask!
+
+"I say, what news have you from the front? All goes well, eh? As for me
+I only hope there will be some of the enemy left for us to kill.  It is
+a glorious thing--this going to war! I think we shall get there very
+soon, where the fighting is.  I can hardly wait for it." And with that
+he hopped up on the steps of the nearest car and posed for his picture.
+
+Having just come from the place whither he was so eagerly repairing I
+might have told him a few things.  I might for example have told him
+what the captain of a German battery in front of La Fere had said, and
+that was this:
+
+"I have been on this one spot for nearly three weeks now, serving my
+guns by day and by night.  I have lost nearly half of my original force
+of men and two of my lieutenants.  We shoot over those tree tops yonder
+in accordance with directions for range and distance which come from
+somewhere else over field telephone, but we never see the men at whom we
+are firing.  They fire back without seeing us, and sometimes their
+shells fall short or go beyond us, and sometimes they fall among us and
+kill and wound a few of us.  Thus it goes on day after day.  I have not
+with my own eyes seen a Frenchman or an Englishman unless he was a
+prisoner.  It is not so much pleasure--fighting like this."
+
+I might have told the young Bavarian lieutenant of other places where I
+had been--places where the dead lay for days unburied.  I might have
+told him there was nothing particularly pretty or particularly edifying
+about the process of being killed.  Death, I take it, is never a very
+tidy proceeding; but in battle it acquires an added unkemptness.  Men
+suddenly and sorely stricken have a way of shrinking up inside their
+clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a way of tearing their
+coats open and gripping with their hands at their vitals, as though to
+hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling their legs in grotesque
+postures; they have a way of putting their arms up before their faces as
+though at the very last they would shut out a dreadful vision.  Those
+contorted, twisted arms with the elbows up, those spraddled stark legs,
+and, most of all, those white dots of shirts--those I had learned to
+associate in my own mind with the accomplished fact of mortality upon
+the field.
+
+I might have told him of sundry field hospitals which I had lately
+visited.  I could recreate in my memory, as I shall be able to recreate
+it as long as I live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain
+schoolhouse in a French town where seven men wriggled and fought in the
+unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity
+with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to
+be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces
+laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up
+at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps
+of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both
+legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men--and boys
+too--all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black
+night which would be their portion through all their days.  Indeed for
+an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which
+he was hastening I might have taken him by the arm and led him across
+two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were
+hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves,
+and macerated out of the living image of their Maker.
+
+But I did none of these things.  He had a picture of something uplifting
+and splendid before his eyes.  He wanted to fight, or he thought he did,
+which came to the same thing.
+
+So what I did was to take down his name and promise to send him a
+completed copy of his picture in the care of his regiment and brigade;
+and the last I saw of him he was half out of a car window waving good-by
+to us and wishing us auf wiedersehen as he was borne away to his
+ordained place.
+
+As we rode back through the town of Maubeuge in the dusk, the company
+which had sung O Strassburg in the Franco-German beer shop at the prow
+of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away.  I
+thought I caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like
+quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about
+to have some luck.
+
+In two days fourteen thousand wounded men came back through Maubeuge,
+and possibly ten times that many new troops, belonging to the first
+October draft of a million, passed down the line.  In that week fifty
+thousand wounded men returned from the German right wing alone.
+
+He's a busy Red Glutton.  There seems to be no satisfying his greed..
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 15
+
+Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe
+
+
+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.
+
+They have called her the cockpit of Europe.  She is too.  In wars that
+were neither of her making nor her choosing she has borne the hardest
+blows--a poor little buffer state thrust in between great and truculent
+neighbors.  To strike at one another they must strike Belgium.  By the
+accident of geography and the caprice of boundary lines she has always
+been the anvil for their hammers.  Jemmapes and Waterloo, to cite two
+especially conspicuous examples among great Continental battles, were
+fought on her soil.  Indeed, there is scarcely an inch of her for the
+possession of which men of breeds not her own--Austrians and Spaniards,
+Hanoverians and Hollanders, Englishmen and Prussians, Saxons and
+Frenchmen--have not contended.  These others won the victories or lost
+them, kept the spoils or gave them up; she wore the scars of the grudges
+when the grudges were settled.  So there is a reason for calling her the
+cockpit of the nations; but, as I said just now, I shall think of her as
+Europe's rag doll--a thing to be clouted and kicked about; to be crushed
+under the hoofs and the heels; to be bled and despoiled and ravished.
+
+Thinking of her so, I do not mean by this comparison to reflect in any
+wise on the courage of her people.  It will be a long time before the
+rest of the world forgets the resistance her soldiers made against
+overbrimming odds, or the fortitude with which the families of those
+soldiers faced a condition too lamentable for description.
+
+Unsolicited, so competent an authority as Julius Caesar once gave the
+Belgians a testimonial for their courage.  If I recall the commentaries
+aright, he said they were the most valorous of all the tribes of Gaul.
+Those who come afterward to set down the tale and tally of the Great War
+will record that through the centuries the Belgians retained their
+ancient valor.
+
+First and last, I had rather exceptional opportunities for viewing the
+travail of Belgium.  I was in Brussels before it surrendered and after
+it surrendered.  I was in Louvain when the Germans entered it and I was
+there again after the Germans had wrecked it.  I trailed the original
+army of invasion from Brussels southward to the French border, starting
+at the tail of the column and reaching the head of it before, with my
+companions, I was arrested and returned by another route across Belgium
+to German soil.
+
+Within three weeks thereafter I started on a ten-day tour which carried
+me through Liege, Namur, Huy, Dinant and Chimay, and brought me back by
+Mons, Brussels, Louvain and Tirlemont, with a side trip to the trenches
+before Antwerp--roughly, a kite-shaped journey which comprehended
+practically all the scope of active operations among the contending
+armies prior to the time when the struggle for western Flanders began.
+Finally, just after Antwerp fell, I skirted the northern frontiers of
+Belgium and watched the refugees pouring across the borders into
+Holland.  I was four times in Liege and three times in Brussels, and any
+number of times I crossed and recrossed my own earlier trails.  I
+traveled afoot; in a railroad train, with other prisoners; in a taxi-
+cab, which we lost; in a butcher's cart, which we gave away; in an open
+carriage, which deserted us; and in an automobile, which vanished.
+
+I saw how the populace behaved while their little army was yet intact,
+offering gallant resistance to the Germans; I saw how they behaved when
+the German wedge split that army into broken fragments and the Germans
+were among them, holding dominion with the bayonet and the bullet; and
+finally, six weeks later, I saw how they behaved when substantially all
+their country, excluding a strip of seaboard, had been reduced to the
+state of a conquered fief held and ruled by force of arms.
+
+By turns I saw them determined, desperate, despairing, half rebellious,
+half subdued; resigned with the resignation of sheer helplessness, which
+I take it is a different thing from the resignation of sheer
+hopelessness.  It is no very pleasant sight to see a country flayed and
+quartered like a bloody carcass in a meat shop; but an even less
+pleasant thing than that is to see a country's heart broken.  And
+Belgium to-day is a country with a broken heart.
+
+These lines were written with intent to be printed early in January.  By
+that time Christmas was over and done with.  On the other side of the
+Atlantic Ocean, in lieu of the Christmas carols, the cannon had rung its
+brazen Christmas message across the trenches, making mockery of the
+words: "On earth peace, good will toward men." On our side of the ocean
+the fine spirit of charity and graciousness which comes to most of us at
+Christmastime and keeps Christmas from becoming a thoroughly
+commercialized institution had begun to abate somewhat of its fervor.
+
+To ourselves we were saying, many of us: "We have done enough for the
+poor, whom we have with us always." But not always do we have with us a
+land famous for its fecundity that is now at grips with famine; a land
+that once was light-hearted, but where now you never hear anyone laugh
+aloud; a land that is half a waste and half a captive province; a land
+that cannot find bread to feed its hungry mouths, yet is called on to
+pay a tribute heavy enough to bankrupt it even in normal times; a land
+whose best manhood is dead on the battleground or rusting in military
+prisons; whose women and children by the countless thousands are either
+homeless wanderers thrust forth on the bounty of strangers in strange
+places, or else are helpless, hungry paupers sitting with idle hands in
+their desolated homes--and that land is Belgium.
+
+Having been an eyewitness to the causes that begot this condition and to
+the condition itself, I feel it my duty to tell the story as I know it.
+I am trying to tell it dispassionately, without prejudice for any side
+and without hysteria.  I concede the same to be a difficult undertaking.
+
+Some space back I wrote that I had been able to find in Belgium no
+direct proof of the mutilations, the torturings and other barbarities
+which were charged against the Germans by the Belgians.  Though fully a
+dozen seasoned journalists, both English and American, have agreed with
+me, saying that their experiences in this regard had been the same as
+mine; and though I said in the same breath that I could not find in
+Germany any direct evidence of the brutalities charged against the
+Belgians by the Germans, the prior statement was accepted by some
+persons as proof that my sympathy for the Belgians had been chilled
+through association with the Germans.  No such thing.  But what I desire
+now is the opportunity to say this: In the face of the present plight of
+this little country we need not look for individual atrocities.  Belgium
+herself is the capsheaf atrocity of the war.  No matter what our
+nationality, our race or our sentiments may be, none of us can get away
+from that.
+
+Going south into France from the German border city of Aix-la-Chapelle,
+our automobile carried us down the Meuse.  On the eastern bank, which
+mainly we followed during the first six hours of riding, there were
+craggy cliffs, covered with forests, which at intervals were cleft by
+deep ravines, where small farms clung to the sides of the steep hills.
+On the opposite shore cultivated lands extended from the limit of one's
+vision down almost to the water.  There they met a continuous chain of
+manufacturing plants, now all idle, which stretched along the river
+shore from end to end of the valley.  Culm and flume and stack and kiln
+succeeded one another unendingly, but no smoke issued from any chimney;
+and we noted that already weeds were springing up in the quarry yards
+and about the mouths of the coal pits and the doorways of the empty
+factories.
+
+Considering that the Germans had to fight their way along the Meuse,
+driving back the French and Belgians before they trusted their columns
+to enter the narrow defiles, there was in the physical aspect of things
+no great amount of damage visible.  Stagnation, though, lay like a
+blight on what had been one of the busiest and most productive
+industrial districts in all of Europe.  Except that trains ran by
+endlessly, bearing wounded men north, and fresh troops and fresh
+supplies south, the river shore was empty and silent.
+
+In twenty miles of running we passed just two groups of busy men.  At
+one place a gang of German soldiers were strengthening the temporary
+supports of a railroad bridge which had been blown up by the retiring
+forces and immediately repaired by the invaders.  In another place a
+company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had
+been sent back from the front in carload lots.  There were horses here
+--a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that
+relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves
+itself.  The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured
+up, or to be shot in the event that they were past mending.
+
+I had seen perhaps a hundred thousand head of horses, drawing cannon and
+wagons, and serving as mounts for officers in the first drive of the
+Germans toward Paris, and had marveled at the uniformly prime condition
+of the teams.  Presumably these sorry crow-baits, which drooped and
+limped about the barren railroad yards at the back of the siding where
+the shell loaders squatted, had been whole-skinned and sound of wind and
+joint in early August.
+
+Two months of service had turned them into gaunt wrecks.  Their ribs
+stuck through their hollow sides.  Their hoofs were broken; their hocks
+were swelled enormously; and, worst of all, there were great raw wounds
+on their shoulders and backs, where the collars and saddles had worn
+through hide and flesh to the bones.  From that time on, the numbers of
+mistreated, worn-out horses we encountered in transit back from the
+front increased steadily.  Finally we ceased to notice them at all.
+
+I should explain that the description I have given of the prevalent
+idleness along the Meuse applied to the towns and to the scattered
+workingmen's villages that flanked all or nearly all the outlying and
+comparatively isolated factories.  In the fields and the truck patches
+the farming folks--women and old men usually, with here and there
+children--bestirred themselves to get the moldered and mildewed
+remnants of their summer-ripened crops under cover before the hard frost
+came.
+
+Invariably we found this state of affairs to exist wherever we went in
+the districts of France and of Belgium that had been fought over and
+which were now occupied by the Germans.  Woodlands and cleared places,
+where engagements had taken place, would, within a month or six weeks
+thereafter, show astonishingly few traces of the violence and death that
+had violated the peace of the countryside.  New grass would be growing
+in the wheel ruts of the guns and on the sides of the trenches in which
+infantry had screened itself.  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.  The civic populace get it, and, as soon
+as they have been readjusted to the altered conditions forced on them by
+the presence of war, they become merely sluggish, dulled spectators of
+the great and moving events going on about them.  The nurses and the
+surgeons get it, or else they would go mad from the horrors that
+surround them.  The wounded get it, and cease from complaint and
+lamenting.
+
+It is as though all the nerve ends in every human body were burnt blunt
+in the first hot gush of war.  Even the casual eyewitness gets it.  We
+got it ourselves; and not until we had quit the zone of hostilities did
+we shake it off.  Indeed, we did not try.  It made for subsequent sanity
+to carry for the time a drugged and stupefied imagination.
+
+Barring only Huy, where there had been some sharp street fighting, as
+attested by shelled buildings and sandbag barricades yet resting on
+housetops and in window sills, we encountered in the first stage of our
+journey no considerable evidences of havoc until late in the afternoon,
+when we reached Dinant.  I do not understand why the contemporary
+chronicles of events did not give more space to Dinant at the time of
+its destruction, and why they have not given it more space subsequently.
+
+I presume the reason lies in the fact that the same terrible week which
+included the burning of Louvain included also the burning of Dinant; and
+in the world-wide cry of protestation and distress which arose with the
+smoke of the greater calamity the smaller voice of grief for little
+ruined Dinant was almost lost. Yet, area considered, no place in Belgium
+that I have visited--and this does not exclude Louvain--suffered such
+wholesale demolition as Dinant.
+
+Before war began, the town had something less than eight thousand
+inhabitants.  When I got there it had less than four thousand, by the
+best available estimates.  Of those four thousand more than twelve
+hundred were then without food from day to day except such as the
+Germans gave them.  There were almost no able-bodied male adults left.
+Some had fled, some were behind bars as prisoners of the Germans, and a
+great many were dead.  Estimates of the number of male inhabitants who
+had been killed by the graycoats for offenses against the inflexible
+code set up by the Germans in eastern Belgium varied.  A cautious native
+whispered that nine hundred of his fellow townsmen were "up there"--by
+that meaning the trenches on the hills back of the town.  A German
+officer, newly arrived on the spot and apparently sincere in his efforts
+to alleviate the misery of the survivors, told us that, judging by what
+data he had been able to gather, between four and six hundred men and
+youths of Dinant had fallen in the house-to-house conflicts between
+Germans and civilians, or in the wholesale executions which followed the
+subjugation of the place and the capture of such ununiformed
+belligerents as were left.
+
+In this instance subjugation meant annihilation.  The lower part of the
+town, where the well-to-do classes lived, was almost unscathed.  Casual
+shell-fire in the two engagements with the French that preceded the
+taking of Dinant had smashed some cornices and shattered some windows,
+but nothing worse befell.  The lower half, made up mainly of the little
+plaster-and-stone houses of working people, was gone, extinguished,
+obliterated.  It lay in scorched and crumbled waste; and in it, as we
+rode through, I saw, excluding soldiers, just two living creatures.  Two
+children, both little girls, were playing at housekeeping on some stone
+steps under a doorway where there was no door, using bits of wreckage
+for furniture.  We stopped a moment to watch them.  They had small china
+dolls.
+
+The river, flowing placidly along between the artificial boundaries of
+its stone quays, and the strange formation of cliffs, rising at the back
+to the height of hundreds of feet, were as they had been.  Soldiers
+paddled on the water in skiffs and thousands of ravens flickered about
+the pinnacles of the rocks, but between river and cliff there was
+nothing but ruination--the graveyard of the homes of three thousand
+people.
+
+Yes, it was the graveyard not alone of their homes but of their
+prosperity and their hopes and their ambitions and their aspirations--
+the graveyard of everything human beings count worth having.  This was
+worse than Hervé or Battice or Visé, or any of the leveled towns we had
+seen.  Taken on the basis of comparative size, it was worse even than
+Louvain, as we discovered later.  It was worse than anything I ever saw
+--worse than anything I ever shall see, I think.
+
+These hollow shells about us were like the picked cadavers of houses.
+Ends of burnt and broken rafters stood up like ribs.  Empty window
+openings stared at us like the eye sockets in skulls.  It was not a town
+upon which we looked, but the dead and rotting bones of a town.
+
+Just over the ragged line that marked the lowermost limits of the
+destructive fury of the conquerors, and inside the section which
+remained intact, we traversed a narrow street called--most
+appropriately, I thought--the Street of Paul the Penitent, and passed a
+little house on the shutters of which was written, in chalked German
+script, these words: "A Grossmutter"--grandmother--"ninety-six years old
+lives here.  Don't disturb her." Other houses along here bore the
+familiar line, written by German soldiers who had been billeted in them:
+"Good people.  Leave them alone!"
+
+The people who enjoyed the protection of these public testimonials were
+visible, a few of them.  They were nearly all women and children.  They
+stood in their shallow doorways as our automobile went by bearing four
+Americans, two German officers and the orderly of one of the officers--
+for we had picked up a couple of chance passengers in Huy--and a German
+chauffeur.  As we interpreted their looks, they had no hate for the
+Germans.  I take it the weight of their woe was so heavy on them that
+they had no room in their souls for anything else.
+
+Just beyond Dinant, at Anseremme, a beautiful little village at the
+mouth of a tiny river, where artists used to come to paint pictures and
+sick folks to breathe the tonic balsam of the hills, we got rooms for
+the night in a smart, clean tavern.  Here was quartered a captain of
+cavalry, who found time--so brisk was he and so high-spirited--to
+welcome us to the best the place afforded, to help set the table for our
+belated supper, and to keep on terms of jovial yet punctilious
+amiability with the woman proprietor and her good-looking daughters;
+also, to require his troopers to pay the women, in salutes and spoken
+thanks, for every small office performed.
+
+The husband of the older woman and the husband of one of the daughters
+were then serving the Belgian colors, assuming that they had not been
+killed or caught; but between them and this German captain a perfect
+understanding had been arrived at. When the head of the house fixed the
+prices she meant to charge us for our accommodations, he spoke up and
+suggested that the rate was scarcely high enough; and also, since her
+regular patrons had been driven away at the beginning of the war, he
+advised us that sizable tips on our leaving would probably be
+appreciated.
+
+Next morning we rose from a breakfast--the meat part of it having been
+furnished from the German commissary--to find twenty lancers exercising
+their horses in a lovely little natural arena, walled by hills, just
+below the small eminence whereon the house stood.  It was like a scene
+from a Wild West exhibition at home, except that these German horsemen
+lacked the dash of our cowpunchers.  Watching the show from a back
+garden, we stood waist deep in flowers, and the captain's orderly, when
+he came to tell us our automobile was ready, had a huge peony stuck in a
+buttonhole of his blouse.  I caught a peep at another soldier, who was
+flirting with a personable Flemish scullery maid behind the protection
+of the kitchen wall.  The proprietress and her daughters stood at the
+door to wave us good-by and to wish us, with apparent sincerity, a safe
+journey down into France, and a safe return.
+
+To drop from this cozy, peaceful place into the town of Dinant again was
+to drop from a small earthly paradise into a small earthly hell.
+Somewhere near the middle of the little perdition our cavalry captain
+pointed to a shell of a house.
+
+"A fortnight ago," he told us, "we found a French soldier in that house
+--or under it, rather.  He had been there four weeks, hiding in the
+basement.  He took some food with him or found some there; at any rate,
+he managed to live four weeks.  He was blind, and nearly deaf, too, when
+we found out where he was and dug him out--but he is still alive."
+
+One of us said we should like to have a look at a man who had undergone
+such an entombment.
+
+"No, you wouldn't," said the captain; "for he is no very pleasant sight.
+He is a slobbering idiot."
+
+In the Grand Place, near the shell-riddled Church of Notre Dame--built
+by the Bishops in the thirteenth century, restored by the Belgian
+Government in the nineteenth, and destroyed by the German guns in the
+twentieth--a long queue of women wound past the doorway of a building
+where German noncommissioned officers handed out to each applicant a big
+loaf of black soldier bread.
+
+"Oh, yes; we feed the poor devils," the German commandant, an elderly,
+scholarly looking man of the rank of major, said to us when he had come
+up to be introduced.  "When our troops entered this town the men of the
+lower classes took up arms and fired at our soldiers; so the soldiers
+burned all their houses and shot all the men who came out of those
+houses.
+
+"All this occurred before I was sent here.  Had I been the commander of
+the troops, I should have shot them without mercy.  It is our law for
+war times, and these Belgian civilians must be taught that they cannot
+fire on German soldiers and not pay for it with their lives and their
+homes.  With the women and children, however, the case is different. On
+my own responsibility I am feeding the destitute.  Every day I give away
+to these people between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred loaves of
+bread; and I give to some who are particularly needy rations of tea and
+sugar and coffee and rice.  Also, I sell to the butcher shops fresh and
+salt meat from our military stores at cost, requiring only that they, in
+turn, shall sell it at no more than a fair profit.  So long as I am
+stationed here I shall do this, for I cannot let them starve before my
+eyes.  I myself have children."
+
+It was like escaping from a pesthouse to cross the one bridge of Dinant
+that remained standing on its piers, and go winding down the lovely
+valley, overtaking and passing many German wagon trains, the stout,
+middle-aged soldier drivers of which drowsed on their seats; passing
+also one marching battalion of foot-reserves, who, their officers
+concurring, broke from the ranks to beg newspapers and cigars from us.
+On the mountain ash the bright red berries dangled in clumps like
+Christmas bells, and some of the leaves of the elm still clung to their
+boughs; so that the wide yellow road was dappled like a wild-cat's back
+with black splotches of shadow.  Only when we curved through some
+village that had been the scene of a skirmish or a reprisal did the
+roofless shells and the toppled walls of the houses, standing gaunt and
+ugly in the sharp sunlight, make us realize that we were still in the
+war tracks.
+
+As nearly as we could tell from our brief scrutiny a great change had
+come over the dwellers in southern Belgium.  In August they had been
+buoyant and confident of the ultimate outcome and very proud of the
+behavior of their little army.  Even when the Germans burst through the
+frontier defenses and descended on them in innumerable swarms they were,
+for the most part, not daunted by those evidences of the invaders'
+numerical superiority and of their magnificent equipment.  The more
+there were of the Germans the fewer of them there would be to come back
+when the Allies, over the French border, fell on them.  This we
+conceived to be the mental attitude of the villagers and the peasants;
+but now they were different.  The difference showed in all their outward
+aspects--in their gaits; in their drooped shoulders and half-averted
+faces; and, most of all, in their eyes.  They had felt the weight of the
+armed hand, and they must have heard the boast, filtering down from the
+officers to the men, and from the men to the native populace, that,
+having taken their country, the Germans meant to keep it; that Belgium,
+ceasing to be Belgium, would henceforth be set down on the map as a part
+of Greater Prussia.
+
+Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may
+reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.
+Yet a national spirit is harder to kill than a national boundary--so the
+students of these things say.  A little flash of flaming hate from the
+dead ashes of things; a quick, darting glance of defiance; a hissed word
+from a seemingly subdued man or woman; a shrill, hostile whoop from a
+ragged youngster behind a hedge--things such as these showed us that the
+courage of the Belgians was not dead.  It had been crushed to the
+ground, but it had not been torn up by the roots.  The roots went down
+too far.  The under dog had secret dreams of the day to come, when he
+should not be underneath, but on top.
+
+Even had there been no abandoned custom-houses to convince us of it, we
+should have known when we crossed from southern Belgium into northern
+France; for in France the proportion of houses that had suffered in
+punitive attacks was, compared with Belgium, as one to ten.  Understand,
+I am speaking of houses that had been deliberately burned in punishment,
+and not of houses that stood in the way of the cannon and the rapid-fire
+guns, and so underwent partial or complete destruction as the result of
+an accidental yet inevitable and unavoidable process.  Of these last
+France, to the square mile, could offer as lamentably large a showing as
+Belgium; but buildings that presented indubitable signs of having been
+fired with torches rather than with shells were few.
+
+Explaining this and applauding it, Germans of high rank said it
+presented direct and confirmatory proof of their claim that sheer wanton
+reprisals were practically unknown in their system of warfare.  Perhaps
+I can best set forth the German attitude in this regard by quoting a
+general whom we interviewed on the subject:
+
+"We do not destroy for the pleasure it gives us.  We destroy only when
+it is necessary. The French rural populace are more rational, more
+tractable and much less turbulent than the Belgians.  To a much greater
+degree than the Belgians they have refrained from acts against our men
+that would call for severe retaliatory measures on our part.
+Consequently we have spared the houses and respected the property of the
+French noncombatants."
+
+Personally I had a theory of my own.  So far as our observations went,
+the people living immediately on both sides of the line were an
+interrelated people, using the same speech and being much alike in
+temperament, manners and mode of conduct.  I reached the private
+conclusion that, because of the chorus of protest that arose from all
+the neutral countries, and particularly from the United States, against
+the severities visited on Belgium in August and September, the word went
+forth to the German forces in the field that the scheme of punishment
+for offenders who violated the field code should be somewhat softened
+and relaxed.  However, that is merely a personal theory.  I may be
+absolutely wrong about it.  The German general who interpreted the
+meaning of the situation may have been absolutely right about it.
+Certainly the physical testimony was on his side.
+
+Also, it seemed to me, the psychology of the people--particularly of the
+womenfolk--in northern France was not that of their neighboors over the
+frontier.  In a trade way the small shopkeepers here faced ruin; the
+Belgians already had been ruined.  The Frenchwomen, whose sons and
+brothers and husbands and fathers were at the front, walked in the
+shadow of a great fear, as you might tell by a look into the face of any
+one of them.  They were as peppercorns between the upper millstone and
+the nether, and the sound of the crunching was always in their ears,
+even though their turn to be ground up had not yet come.
+
+For the Belgian women, however, the worst that might befall had already
+happened to them; their souls could be wrung no more; they had no terror
+of the future, since the past had been so terrible and the present was a
+living desolation of all they counted worth while.  You might say the
+Frenchwomen dreaded what the Belgians endured.  The refilled cup was at
+the lips of France; Belgium had drained it dry.
+
+Yet in both countries the women generally manifested the same steadfast
+and silent patience.  They said little; but their eyes asked questions.
+In the French towns we saw how bravely they strove to carry on their
+common affairs of life, which were so sadly shaken and distorted out of
+all normality by the earthquake of war.
+
+For currency they had small French coins and strange German coins, and
+in some places futile-looking, little green-and-white slips, issued by
+the municipality in denominations of one franc and two francs and five
+francs, and redeemable in hard specie "three months after the
+declaration of peace." For wares to sell they had what remained of their
+depleted stocks; and for customers, their friends and neighbors, who
+looked forward to commercial ruin, which each day brought nearer to them
+all.  Outwardly they were placid enough, but it was not the placidity of
+content.  It bespoke rather a dumb, disciplined acceptance by those who
+have had fatalism literally thrust on them as a doctrine to be
+practiced.
+
+Looking back on it I can recall just one woman I saw in France who
+maintained an unquenchable blitheness of spirit.  She was the little
+woman who managed the small cafe in Maubeuge where we ate our meals.
+Perhaps her frugal French mind rejoiced that business remained so good,
+for many officers dined at her table and, by Continental standards, paid
+her well and abundantly for what she fed them; but I think a better
+reason lay in the fact that she had within her an innate buoyancy which
+nothing--not even war--could daunt.
+
+She was one of those women who remain trig and chic though they be
+slovens by instinct.  Her blouse was never clean, but she wore it with
+an air.  Her skirt testified that skillets spit grease; but in it she
+somehow looked as trim as a trout fly.  Even the hole in her stocking
+gave her piquancy; and she had wonderful black hair, which probably had
+not been combed properly for a month, and big, crackling black eyes.
+They told us that one day, a week or two before we came, she had been
+particularly cheerful--so cheerful that one of her patrons was moved to
+inquire the cause of it.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I am quite content with life to-day.  I have word that
+my husband is a prisoner.  Now he is out of danger and you Germans will
+have to feed him--and he is a great eater! If you starve him then I
+shall starve you."
+
+At breakfast Captain Mannesmann, who was with us, asked her in his best
+French for more butter.  She paused in her quick, bird-like movements--
+for she was waitress, cook, cashier, manager and owner, all rolled into
+one--and cocking a saucy, unkempt head at him asked that the question be
+repeated.  This time, in his efforts to be understood, he stretched his
+words out so that unwittingly his voice took on rather a whining tone.
+
+"Well, don't cry about it!" she snapped.  "I'll see what I can do."
+
+Returning from the battle front our itinerary included a long stretch of
+the great road that runs between Paris and Brussels, a road much favored
+formerly by auto tourists, but now used almost altogether for military
+purposes.  Considering that we traversed a corner of the stage of one of
+the greatest battles thus far waged--Mons--and that this battle had
+taken place but a few weeks before, there were remarkably few evidences
+remaining of it.
+
+With added force we remarked a condition that had given us material for
+wonderment in our earlier journeyings.  Though a retreating army and an
+advancing army, both enormous in size, had lately poured through the
+country, the houses, the farms and the towns were almost undamaged.
+
+Certain contrasts which took on a heightened emphasis by reason of their
+brutal abruptness, abounded all over Belgium.  You passed at a step, as
+it were, from a district of complete and irreparable destruction to one
+wherein all things were orderly and ordered, and much as they should be
+in peaceful times.  Were it not for the stagnated towns and the
+depression that berode the people, one would hardly know these areas had
+lately been overrun by hostile soldiers and now groaned under enormous
+tithes.  In isolated instances the depression had begun to lift.
+Certain breeds of the polyglot Flemish race have, it appears, an almost
+unkillable resilience of temper; but in a town a mile away all those
+whom we met would be like dead people who walked.
+
+Also, there were many graves.  If we passed a long ridged mound of clay
+in a field, unmarked except by the piled-up clods, we knew that at this
+spot many had fought and many had fallen; but if, as occurred
+constantly, one separate mound or a little row of separate mounds was at
+the roadside, that probably meant a small skirmish.  Such a grave almost
+always was marked by a little wooden cross, with a name penciled on it;
+and often the comrades of the dead man had hung his cap on the upright
+of the cross.  If it were a French cap or a Belgian the weather would
+have worn it to a faded blue-and-red wisp of worsted.  The German
+helmets stood the exposure better.  They retained their shape.
+
+On a cross I saw one helmet with a bullet hole right through the center
+of it in front. Sometimes there would be flowers on the mound, faded
+garlands of field poppies and wreaths of withered wild vines; and by the
+presence of these we could tell that the dead man's mates had time and
+opportunity to accord him greater honor than usually is be-stowed on a
+soldier killed in an advance or during a retreat.
+
+Mons was reached soon, looking much as I imagine Mons must always have
+looked; and then, after a few stretching and weary leagues, Brussels--to
+my mind the prettiest and smartest of the capital cities of Europe, not
+excluding Paris.  I first saw Brussels when it was as gay as carnival--
+that was in mid-August; and, though Liege had fallen and Namur was
+falling, and the German legions were eating up the miles as they hurried
+forward through the dust and smoke of their own making, Brussels still
+floated her flags, built her toy barricades, and wore a gay face to mask
+the panic clutching at her nerves.
+
+Getting back four days later I found her beginning to rally from the
+shock of the invasion. Her people, relieved to find that the enemy did
+not mean to mistreat noncombatants who obeyed his code of laws, were
+going about their affairs in such odd hours as they could spare from
+watching the unending gray freshet that roared and pounded through their
+streets.  The flags were down and the counterfeit light-heartedness was
+gone; but essentially she was the same Brussels.
+
+Coming now, however, six weeks later, I found a city that had been
+transformed out of her own customary image by captivity and hunger and
+hard-curbed resentment.  The pulse of her life seemed hardly to beat at
+all.  She lay in a coma, flashing up feverishly sometimes at false
+rumors of German repulses to the southward.
+
+Only the day before we arrived a wild story got abroad among the
+starvelings in the poorer quarters that the Russians had taken Berlin
+and had swept across Prussia and were now pushing forward, with an
+irresistible army, to relieve Brussels.  So thousands of the deluded
+populace went to a bridge on the eastern outskirts of the town to catch
+the first glimpse of the victorious oncoming Russians; and there they
+stayed until nightfall, watching and hoping and--what was more pitiable
+--believing.
+
+From what I saw of him I judged that the military governor of Brussels,
+Major Bayer, was not only a diplomat but a kindly and an engaging
+gentleman.  Certainly he was wrestling most manfully, and I thought
+tactfully, with a difficult and a dangerous situation.  For one thing,
+he was keeping his soldiers out of sight as much as possible without
+relaxing his grip on the community.  He did this, he said, to reduce the
+chances of friction between his men and the people; for friction might
+mean a spark and a spark might mean a conflagration, and that would mean
+another and greater Louvain.  We could easily understand that small
+things might readily grow into great and serious troubles.  Even the
+most docile-minded man would be apt to resent in the wearer of a hated
+uniform what he might excuse as over-officiousness or love of petty
+authority were the offender a policeman of his own nationality.
+Brooding over their own misfortunes had worn the nerves of these
+captives to the very quick.
+
+In any event, be the outcome of this war what it may, I do not believe
+the Belgians can ever be molded, either by kindness or by sternness,
+into a tractable vassal race. German civilization I concede to be a
+magnificent thing--for a German; but it seems to press on an alien neck
+as a galling yoke.  Belgium under Berlin rule would be, I am sure,
+Alsace and Lorraine all over again on a larger scale, and an unhappier
+one.  She would never, in my humble opinion, be a star in the Prussian
+constellation, but always a raw sore in the Prussian side.
+
+In Major Bayer's office I saw the major stamp an order that turned over
+to the acting burgomaster ten thousand bags of flour for distribution
+among the more needy citizens. We were encouraged to believe that this
+was by way of a free gift from the German Government.  It may have been
+made without payment or promise of payment.  In regard to that I cannot
+say positively; but this was the inference we drew from the statements
+of the German officers who took part in the proceeding.  As for the
+acting burgomaster, he stood through the scene silent and inscrutable,
+saying nothing at all.  Possibly he did not understand; the
+conversation--or that part of it which concerned us--was carried on
+exclusively in English.  His face, as he bowed to accept the certified
+warrant for the flour, gave us no hint of his mental processes.
+
+Major Bayer claimed a professional kinship with those of us who were
+newspaper men, as he was the head of the Boy Scout movement in Germany
+and edited the official organ of the Boy Scouts.  He had a squad of his
+scouts on messenger duty at his headquarters--smart, alert-looking
+youngsters.  They seemed to me to be much more competent in their
+department than were the important-appearing German Secret Service
+agents who infested the building.  The Germans may make first-rate
+spies--assuredly their system of espionage was well organized before the
+war broke out--but I do not think they are conspicuous successes as
+detectives: their methods are so delightfully translucent.
+
+Major Bayer had been one of the foremost German officers to set foot on
+Belgian soil after the severance of friendly relations between the two
+countries.  "I believe," he said, "that I heard the first shot fired in
+this war.  It came from a clump of trees within half an hour after our
+advance guard crossed the boundary south of Aachen, and it wounded the
+leg of a captain who commanded a company of scouts at the head of the
+column. Our skirmishers surrounded the woods and beat the thickets, and
+presently they brought forth the man who had fired the shot.  He was
+sixty years old, and he was a civilian. Under the laws of war we shot
+him on the spot.  So you see probably the first shot fired in this war
+was fired at us by a franc-tireur.  By his act he had forfeited his
+life, but personally I felt sorry for him; for I believe, like many of
+his fellow countrymen who afterward committed such offenses, he was
+ignorant of the military indefensibility of his attack on us and did not
+realize what the consequences would be.
+
+"I am sure, though, that the severity with which we punished these
+offenses at the outset was really merciful, for only by killing the
+civilians who fired on us, and by burning their houses, could we bring
+home to thousands of others the lesson that if they wished to fight us
+they must enlist in their own army and come against us in uniforms, as
+soldiers."
+
+Within the same hour we were introduced to Privy Councilor Otto von
+Falke, an Austrian by birth, but now, after long service in Cologne and
+Berlin, promoted to be Director of Industrial Arts for Prussia.  He had
+been sent, he explained, by order of his Kaiser, to superintend the
+removal of historic works of art from endangered churches and other
+buildings, and turn them over to the curator of the Royal Belgian
+Gallery, at Brussels, for storage in the vaults of the museum until such
+time as peace had been restored and they might be returned with safety
+to their original positions.
+
+"So you see, gentlemen," said Professor von Falke, "the Germans are not
+despoiling Belgium of its wealth of pictures and statues.  We are taking
+pains to preserve and perpetuate them.  They belong to Belgium--not to
+us; and we have no desire to take them away.  Certainly we are not
+vandals who would wantonly destroy the splendid things of art, as our
+enemies have claimed."
+
+He was plainly a sincere man and he was much in love with his work;
+that, too, was easy to see.  Afterward, though, the thought came to us
+that, if Belgium was to become a German state by right of seizure and
+conquest, he was saving these masterpieces of Vandyke and Rubens, not
+for Belgium, but for the greater glory of the Greater Empire.
+
+However, that was beside the mark.  What at the moment seemed to us of
+more consequence even than rescuing holy pictures was that all about us
+were sundry hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who did not
+need pictures, but food.  You had only to look at them in the streets to
+know that their bellies felt the grind of hunger. Famine knocked at half
+the doors in that city of Brussels, and we sat in the glittering cafe of
+the Palace Hotel and talked of pictures!
+
+We called on Minister Brand Whitlock, whom we had not seen--McCutcheon
+and I--since the Sunday afternoon a month and a half before when we two
+left his official residence in a hired livery rig for a ride to
+Waterloo, which ride extended over a thousand miles, one way and
+another, and carried us into three of the warring countries.  Mention of
+this call gives me opportunity to say in parenthesis, so to speak, that
+if ever a man in acutely critical circumstances kept his head, and did a
+big job in a big way, and reflected credit at a thousand angles on
+himself and the country that had the honor to be served by him, that man
+was Brand Whitlock.  To him, a citizen of another nation, the people of
+forlorn Brussels probably owe more than to any man of their own race.
+
+Grass was sprouting from between the cobbles of the streets in the
+populous residential districts through which we passed on the way from
+the American Ministry to our next stopping place.  Viewed at a short
+distance each vista of empty street had a wavy green beard on its face;
+and by this one might judge to what a low ebb the commerce and the
+pleasure of the city had fallen since its occupation.  There was one
+small square where goats and geese might have been pastured.  It looked
+as though weeks might have passed since wagon wheels had rolled over
+those stones; and the town folks whose houses fronted on the little
+square lounged in their doorways, with idle hands thrust into their
+pockets, regarding us with lackluster, indifferent eyes.  It may have
+been fancy, but I thought nearly all of them looked griped of frame and
+that their faces seemed drawn. Seeing them so, you would have said that,
+with them, nothing mattered any more.
+
+We saw a good many people, though, who were taking for the moment an
+acute and uneasy interest in their own affairs, at the big city prison,
+where we spent half an hour or so.  Here, in a high-walled courtyard, we
+found upward of two hundred offenders against small civic regulations,
+serving sentences ranging in length from seven days to thirty. Perhaps
+one in three was a German soldier, and probably one in ten was a woman
+or a girl; the rest were male citizens of all ages, sizes and social
+grading, a few Congo negroes being mixed in.  Most of the time they
+stayed in their cells, in solitary confinement; but on certain
+afternoons they might take the air and see visitors in the bleak and
+barren inclosure where they were now herded together.
+
+By common rumor in Brussels the Germans were shooting all persons caught
+secretly peddling copies of French or English papers or unauthorized and
+clandestine Belgian papers; since only orthodox German papers were
+permitted to be sold.  The Germans themselves took no steps to deny
+these stories, but in the prison we found a large collection of forlorn
+newsdealers.  Having been captured with the forbidden wares in their
+possession, they had mysteriously vanished from the ken of their
+friends; but they had not been "put against the wall," as they say in
+Europe.  They had been given fourteen days apiece, with a promise of six
+months if they transgressed a second time.
+
+One little man, with the longest and sleekest and silkiest black
+whiskers I have seen in many a day, recognized us as Americans and drew
+near to tell us his troubles in a confidential whisper.  By his bleached
+indoor complexion and his manners anyone would have known him for a
+pastry cook or a hairdresser.  A hairdresser he was; and in a better day
+than this, not far remote, had conducted a fashionable establishment on
+a fashionable boulevard.
+
+"Ah, I am in one very sad state," he said in his twisted English.  "I
+start for Ostend to take winter garments for my two small daughters,
+which are there at school, and they arrest me--these Germans--and keep
+me two days in a cowshed, and then bring me back here and put me here in
+this so-terrible-a-place for two weeks; and all for nothing at all."
+
+"Didn't you have a pass to go through the lines?" I asked.  "Perhaps
+that was it."
+
+"I have already a pass," he said; "but when they search me they find in
+my pockets letters which I am taking to people in Ostend.  I do not know
+what is in those letters. People ask me to take them to friends of
+theirs in Ostend and I consent, not knowing it is against the rule.
+They read these letters--the Germans--and say I am carrying news to
+their enemies; and they become very enrage at me and lock me up.  Never
+again will I take letters for anybody anywhere.
+
+"Oh, sirs, if you could but see the food we eat here! For dinner we have
+a stew--oh, such a stew!--and for breakfast only bread and coffee who is
+not coffee!" And with both hands he combed his whiskers in a despair
+that was comic and yet pitiful.
+
+He was standing there, still combing, as we came away.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 16
+
+Louvain the Forsaken
+
+
+It was Sunday when I saw Louvain in the ashes of her desolation.  We
+were just back then from the German trenches before Antwerp; and the
+hollow sounds of the big guns which were fired there at spaced intervals
+came to our ears as we rode over the road leading out from Brussels,
+like the boomings of great bells.  The last time I had gone that way the
+country was full of refugees fleeing from burning villages on beyond.
+Now it was bare, except for a few baggage trains lumbering along under
+escort of shaggy gray troopers.  Perhaps I should say they were gray-
+and-yellow troopers, for the plastered mud and powdered dust of three
+months of active campaigning had made them of true dirt color.
+
+Oh, yes; I forgot one other thing: We overtook a string of wagons fitted
+up as carryalls and bearing family parties of the burghers to Louvain to
+spend a day among the wreckage.  There is no accounting for tastes.  If
+I had been a Belgian the last thing I should want my wife and my baby to
+see would be the ancient university town, the national cradle of the
+Church, in its present state.  Nevertheless there were many
+excursionists in Louvain that day.
+
+The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses
+from as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from
+Brussels.  They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain
+ranges of waste, and they mined in the debris mounds for souvenirs.
+Altogether, I suppose some of them regarded it as a kind of picnic.
+Personally I should rather go to a morgue for a picnic than to Louvain
+as it looks to-day.  I tried hard, both in Germany among the German
+soldiers and in Belgium among the Belgians, to get at the truth about
+Louvain.  The Germans said the outbreak was planned, and that firing
+broke out at a given signal in various quarters of the town; that, from
+windows and basements and roofs, bullets rained on them; and that the
+fighting continued until they had smoked the last of the inhabitants
+from their houses with fire and put them to death as they fled.  The
+Belgians proclaimed just as stoutly that, mistaking an on marching
+regiment for enemies, the Germans fired on their own people; and then,
+in rage at having committed such an error and to cover it up, they
+turned on the townspeople and mixed massacre with pillaging and burning
+for the better part of a night and a day.
+
+I could, I think, sense something of the viewpoint of each.  To the
+Belgian, a German in his home or in his town was no more than an armed
+housebreaker.  What did he care for the code of war? He was not
+responsible for the war.  He had no share in framing the code.  He took
+his gun, and when the chance came he fired---and fired to kill.
+Perhaps, at first, he did not know that by that same act he forfeited
+his life and sacrificed his home and jeopardized the lives and homes of
+all his neighbors.  Perhaps in the blind fury of the moment he did not
+much care.
+
+Take the German soldier: He had proved he was ready to meet his enemy in
+the open and to fight him there.  When his comrade fell at his side,
+struck down by an unseen, skulking foe, who lurked behind a hedge or a
+chimney, he saw red and he did red deeds.  That in his reprisals he went
+farther than some might have gone under similar conditions is rather to
+have been expected.  In point of organization, in discipline, and in the
+enactment of a terribly stern, terribly deadly course of conduct for
+just such emergencies, his masters had gone farther than the heads of
+any modern army ever went before.  You see, all the laboriously built-up
+ethics of civilized peace came into direct conflict with the bloody
+ethics of war, which are never civilized, and which frequently are born
+in the instant and molded on the instant to suit the purposes of those
+who create them.  And Louvain is perhaps the most finished and perfect
+example we have in this world to-day to show the consequences of such a
+clash.
+
+I am not going to try to describe Louvain.  Others have done that
+competently.  The Belgians were approximately correct when they said
+Louvain had been destroyed.  The Germans were technically right when
+they said not over twenty per cent of its area had been reduced; but
+that twenty per cent included practically the whole business district,
+practically all the better class of homes, the university, the
+cathedral, the main thoroughfares, the principal hotels and shops and
+cafes.  The famous town hall alone stood unscathed; it was saved by
+German soldiers from the common fate of all things about it.  What
+remained, in historic value and in physical beauty, and even in tangible
+property value, was much less than what was gone forever.
+
+I sought out the hotel near the station where we had stayed, as enforced
+guests of the German army, for three days in August. Its site was a
+leveled gray mass, sodden, wrecked past all redemption; ruined beyond
+all thought of salvage.  I looked for the little inn at which we had
+dined.  Its front wall littered the street and its interior was a jumble
+of worthlessness.  I wondered again as I had wondered many times before
+what had become of its proprietor--the dainty, gentle little woman whose
+misshapen figure told us she was near the time for her baby.
+
+I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk cafe where we
+sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation--August
+twenty-first, I think, was the date--and watched the sun go out in
+eclipse like a copper disk.  We did not know it then, but it was
+Louvain's bloody eclipse we saw presaged that day in the suddenly
+darkened heavens.  Even the lines of the sidewalks were loSt. The road
+was piled high with broken, fire-smudged masonry.  The building behind
+was a building no longer.  It was a husk of a house, open to the sky,
+backless and front-less, and fit only to tumble down in the next high
+wind.
+
+As we stood before the empty railroad station, in what I veritably
+believe to be the forlornest spot there is on this earth, a woman in a
+shawl came whining to sell us postal cards, on which were views of the
+desolation that was all about us.
+
+"Please buy some pictures," she said in French.  "My husband is dead."
+
+"When did he die?" one of us asked.
+
+She blinked, as though trying to remember.
+
+"That night," she said as though there had never been but one night.
+"They killed him then--that night." "Who killed him?" "They did."
+
+She pointed in the direction of the square fronting the station.  There
+were German soldiers where she pointed--both living ones and dead ones.
+The dead ones, eighty-odd of them, were buried in two big crosswise
+trenches, in a circular plot that had once been a bed of ornamental
+flowers surrounding the monument of some local notable.  The living ones
+were standing sentry duty at the fence that flanked the railroad tracks
+beyond.
+
+"They did," she said; "they killed him! Will you buy some postal cards,
+m'sieur? All the best pictures of the ruins!"
+
+She said it flatly, without color in her voice, or feeling or emotion.
+She did not, I am sure, flinch mentally as she looked at the Germans.
+Certainly she did not flinch visibly.  She was past flinching, I
+suppose.
+
+The officer in command of the force holding the town came, just before
+we started, to warn us to beware of bicyclists who might be encountered
+near Tirlemont.
+
+"They are all franc-tireurs--those Belgians on wheels," he said.  "Some
+of them are straggling soldiers, wearing uniforms under their other
+clothes.  They will shoot at you and trust to their bicycles to get
+away.  We've caught and killed some of them, but there are still a few
+abroad.  Take no chances with them.  If I were in your place I should be
+ready to shoot first."
+
+We asked him how the surviving populace of Louvain was behaving.
+
+"Oh, we have them--like that!" he said with a laugh, and clenched his
+hand up in a knot of knuckles to show what he meant.  "They know better
+than to shoot at a German soldier now; but if looks would kill we'd all
+be dead men a hundred times a day." And he laughed again.
+
+Of course it was none of our business; but it seemed to us that if we
+were choosing a man to pacify and control the ruined people of ruined
+Louvain this square-headed, big-fisted captain would not have been our
+first choice.
+
+It began to rain hard as our automobile moved through the wreckage-
+strewn street which, being followed, would bring us to the homeward
+road--home in this instance meaning Germany.  The rain, soaking into the
+debris, sent up a sour, nasty smell, which pursued us until we had
+cleared the town.  That exhalation might fully have been the breath of
+the wasted place, just as the distant, never-ending boom of the guns
+might have been the lamenting voice of the war-smitten land itself.
+
+I remember Liege best at this present distance by reason of a small
+thing that occurred as we rode, just before dusk, through a byway near
+the river.  In the gloomy, wet Sunday street two bands of boys were
+playing at being soldiers.  Being soldiers is the game all the children
+in Northern Europe have played since the first of last August.
+
+From doorways and window sills their lounging elders watched these Liege
+urchins as they waged their mimic fight with wooden guns and wooden
+swords; but, while we looked on, one boy of an inventive turn of mind
+was possessed of a great idea.  He proceeded to organize an execution
+against a handy wall, with one small person to enact the role of the
+condemned culprit and half a dozen others to make up the firing squad.
+
+As the older spectators realized what was afoot a growl of dissent
+rolled up and down the street; and a stout, red-faced matron, shrilly
+protesting, ran out into the road and cuffed the boys until they broke
+and scattered.  There was one game in Liege the boys might not play.
+
+The last I saw of Belgium was when I skirted her northern frontier,
+making for the seacoast. The guns were silent now, for Antwerp had
+surrendered; and over all the roads leading up into Holland refugees
+were pouring in winding streams.  They were such refugees as I had seen
+a score of times before, only now there were infinitely more of them
+than ever before: men, women and children, all afoot; all burdened with
+bags and bundles; all dressed in their best clothes--they did well to
+save their best, since they could save so little else--all or nearly all
+bearing their inevitable black umbrellas.
+
+They must have come long distances; but I marked that none of them
+moaned or complained, or gave up in weariness and despair.  They went on
+and on, with their weary backs bent to their burdens and their weary
+legs trembling under them; and we did not know where they were going--
+and they did not know.  They just went.  What they must face before them
+could not equal what they left behind them; so they went on.
+
+That poor little rag doll, with its head crushed in the wheel tracks,
+does not after all furnish such a good comparison for Belgium, I think,
+as I finish this tale; for it had sawdust insides--and Belgium's vitals
+are the vitals of courage and patience.
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paths of Glory, by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Paths of Glory
+       Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front
+
+Author: Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2004 [EBook #10798]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHS OF GLORY ***
+
+
+
+
+
+PATHS OF GLORY
+
+Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front
+
+BY IRVIN S. COBB
+
+AUTHOR OF "BACK HOME," "EUROPE REVISED,' ETC., ETC.
+
+"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+--Thomas Gray
+
+
+
+To the Memory of
+MAJOR ROBERT COBB
+(Cobb's Kentucky Battery, C. S. A.)
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+What is enclosed between these covers was written as a series of
+first-hand impressions during the fall and early winter of 1914 while the
+writer was on staff service for The Saturday Evening Post in the western
+theatre of the European War. I tried to write of war as I saw it at the
+time that I saw it, or immediately afterward, when the memory of what I
+had seen was fresh and vivid in my mind.
+
+In this volume, as here presented, no attempt has been made to follow
+either logically or chronologically the progress of events in the
+campaigning operations of which I was a witness. The chapters are
+interrelated insofar as they purport to be a sequence of pictures
+describing some of my experiences and setting forth a few of my
+observations in Belgium, in Germany, in France and in England during the
+first three months of hostilities.
+
+At the outset I had no intention of undertaking to write a book on the
+war. If in the kindly judgment of the reader what I have written
+constitutes a book I shall be gratified.
+
+I. S. C.
+
+January, 1915.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I.    A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe.
+II.   To War in a Taxicab.
+III.  Sherman Said It.
+IV.  "Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter".
+V.    Being a Guest of the Kaiser.
+VI.   With the German Wrecking Crew
+VII.  The Grapes of Wrath..
+VIII. Three Generals and a Cook
+IX.   Viewing a Battle prom a Balloon
+X.    In the Trenches Before Rheims..
+XI.   War de Luxe...
+XII.  The Rut of Big Guns in France..
+XIII. Those Yellow Pine Boxes..
+XIV.  The Red Glutton..
+XV.   Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe .
+XVI.  Louvain the Forsaken.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 1
+
+A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe
+
+
+We passed through it late in the afternoon--this little Belgian town
+called Montignies St. Christophe--just twenty-four hours behind a dust-
+colored German column.  I am going to try now to tell how it looked to
+us.
+
+I am inclined to think I passed this way a year before, or a little
+less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that.  Traveling 'cross
+country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked
+when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage.
+
+Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not pass, through this little
+town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through fifty
+like it--each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord,
+along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each
+with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking trough, its
+priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings
+of saber and belt and shoulder straps.
+
+I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the
+shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking
+vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time
+I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel.
+
+But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it
+out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other
+unimportant villages in this upper left-hand corner of the map of
+Europe.  The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a
+side-slap.
+
+We came to it just before dusk.  All day we had been hurrying along,
+trying to catch up with the German rear guard; but the Germans moved
+faster than we did, even though they fought as they went.  They had gone
+round the southern part of Belgium like coopers round a cask, hooping it
+in with tight bands of steel.  Belgium--or this part of it--was all
+barreled up now: chines, staves and bung; and the Germans were already
+across the line, beating down the sod of France with their pelting feet.
+
+Besides we had stopped often, for there was so much to see and to hear.
+There was the hour we spent at Merbes-le-Chateau, where the English had
+been; and the hour we spent at La Buissiere, on the river Sambre, where
+a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Chateau is
+another story and so is La Buissiere.  Just after La Buissiere we came
+to a tiny village named Neuville and halted while the local Jack-of-all-
+trades mended for us an invalided tire on a bicycle.
+
+As we grouped in the narrow street before his shop, with a hiving swarm
+of curious villagers buzzing about us, an improvised ambulance, with a
+red cross painted on its side over the letters of a baker's sign, went
+up the steep hill at the head of the cobbled street. At that the women
+in the doorways of the small cottages twisted their gnarled red hands in
+their aprons, and whispered fearsomely among themselves, so that the
+sibilant sound of their voices ran up and down the line of houses in a
+long, quavering hiss.
+
+The wagon, it seemed, was bringing in a wounded French soldier who had
+been found in the woods beyond the river.  He was one of the last to be
+found alive, which was another way of saying that for two days and two
+nights he had been lying helpless in the thicket, his stomach empty and
+his wounds raw.  On each of those two nights it had rained, and rained
+hard.
+
+Just as we started on our way the big guns began booming somewhere ahead
+of us toward the southwest; so we turned in that direction.
+
+We had heard the guns distinctly in the early forenoon, and again, less
+distinctly, about noontime.  Thereafter, for a while, there had been a
+lull in the firing; but now it was constant--a steady, sustained boom-
+boom-boom, so far away that it fell on the eardrums as a gentle
+concussion; as a throb of air, rather than as a real sound.  For three
+days now we had been following that distant voice of the cannon, trying
+to catch up with it as it advanced, always southward, toward the French
+frontier.  Therefore we flogged the belly of our tired horse with the
+lash of a long whip, and hurried along.  There were five of us, all
+Americans.  The two who rode on bicycles pedaled ahead as outriders, and
+the remaining three followed on behind with the horse and the dogcart.
+We had bought the outfit that morning and we were to lose it that night.
+The horse was an aged mare, with high withers, and galls on her
+shoulders and fetlocks unshorn, after the fashion of Belgian horses; and
+the dogcart was a venerable ruin, which creaked a great protest at every
+turn of the warped wheels on the axle.  We had been able to buy the two--
+the mare and the cart--only because the German soldiers had not thought
+them worth the taking.
+
+In this order, then, we proceeded.  Pretty soon the mare grew so weary
+she could hardly lift her shaggy old legs; so, footsore as we were, we
+who rode dismounted and trudged on, taking turns at dragging her forward
+by the bit.  I presume we went ahead thus for an hour or more, along an
+interminable straight road and past miles of the checkered light and
+dark green fields which in harvest time make a great backgammon board of
+this whole country of Belgium.
+
+The road was empty of natives--empty, too, of German wagon trains; and
+these seemed to us curious things, because there had until then been
+hardly a minute of the day when we were not passing soldiers or meeting
+refugees.
+
+Almost without warning we came on this little village called Montignies
+St. Christophe.  A six-armed signboard at a crossroads told us its name
+--a rather impressive name ordinarily for a place of perhaps twenty
+houses, all told.  But now tragedy had given it distinction; had painted
+that straggling frontier hamlet over with such colors that the picture
+of it is going to live in my memory as long as I do live.  At the upper
+end of the single street, like an outpost, stood an old chateau, the
+seat, no doubt, of the local gentry, with a small park of beeches and
+elms round it; and here, right at the park entrance, we had our first
+intimation that there had been a fight.  The gate stood ajar between its
+chipped stone pillars, and just inside the blue coat of a French cavalry
+officer, jaunty and new and much braided with gold lace on the collar
+and cuffs, hung from the limb of a small tree.  Beneath the tree were a
+sheaf of straw in the shape of a bed and the ashes of a dead camp fire;
+and on the grass, plain to the eye, a plump, well-picked pullet, all
+ready for the pot or the pan.  Looking on past these things we saw much
+scattered dunnage: Frenchmen's knapsacks, flannel shirts, playing cards,
+fagots of firewood mixed together like jackstraws, canteens covered with
+slate-blue cloth and having queer little hornlike protuberances on their
+tops--which proved them to be French canteens--tumbled straw, odd shoes
+with their lacings undone, a toptilted service shelter of canvas; all
+the riffle of a camp that had been suddenly and violently disturbed.
+
+As I think back it seems to me that not until that moment had it
+occurred to us to regard closely the cottages and shops beyond the
+clumped trees of the chateau grounds.  We were desperately weary, to
+begin with, and our eyes, those past three days, had grown used to the
+signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake
+of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.
+
+Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
+shot to bits.  From our side--that is to say, from the north and
+likewise from the west--the Germans had shelled it.  From the south,
+plainly, the French had answered.  The village, in between, had caught
+the full force and fury of the contending fires.  Probably the
+inhabitants had warning; probably they fled when the German skirmishers
+surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park.  One imagined
+them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage
+patches.  But they had left their belongings behind, all their small
+petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and
+racking apart of their homes.
+
+A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street.
+Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the
+cross-ties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like
+rows of snaggled teeth.  Other shells, dropping in the road, had so
+wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and
+there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet
+deep.
+
+Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again.  One house
+would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to
+the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves.  Another house
+would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were
+now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter's
+door.  The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all
+gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily, like
+eye-sockets without eyes.
+
+So it went.  Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were
+quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still
+smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.
+
+Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted.  If she had had
+energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way
+she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses--a big gray and a
+roan--with their stark legs sticking out across the road.  The gray was
+shot through and through in three places.  The right fore hoof of the
+roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and
+the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it, suggesting a
+natural malformation.  Dead only a few hours, their carcasses already
+had begun to swell.  The skin on their bellies was as tight as a
+drumhead.
+
+We forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses.  Beyond them the
+road was a litter.  Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots,
+pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere.  The
+deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things.
+The dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always French caps and
+French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after the
+melee.
+
+The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French had
+fallen back--or at least so we deduced from the looks of things.  In
+the debris was no object that bespoke German workmanship or German
+ownership.  This rather puzzled us until we learned that the Germans, as
+tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast
+rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or
+small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to give the enemy an idea
+of their losses.
+
+We went by the church.  Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small
+flag--the Tricolor of France--still fluttered from a window where some
+one had stuck it.  We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a
+sign over its door--a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx.  And
+through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a
+table.  We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front
+of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn
+I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from
+the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled.  The
+figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that its wearer must have
+belonged to the Eighteenth Cavalry Regiment.  Behind the barn we found a
+whole pile of new knapsacks--the flimsy play-soldier knapsacks of the
+French infantrymen, not half so heavy or a third so substantial as the
+heavy sacks of the Germans, which are all bound with straps and covered
+on the back side with undressed red bullock's hide.
+
+Until now we had seen, in all the silent, ruined village, no human
+being.  The place fairly ached with emptiness.  Cats sat on the
+doorsteps or in the windows, and presently from a barn we heard
+imprisoned beasts lowing dismally.  Cows were there, with agonized
+udders and, penned away from them, famishing calves; but there were no
+dogs.  We already had remarked this fact--that in every desolated
+village cats were thick enough; but invariably the sharp-nosed, wolfish-
+looking Belgian dogs had disappeared along with their masters.  And it
+was so in Montignies St. Christophe.
+
+On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf--a
+breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which
+the Germans had kicked half down--I counted three cats, seated side by
+side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
+
+It was just after we had gone by the barricade that, in a shed behind
+the riddled shell of a house, which was almost the last house of the
+town, one of our party saw an old, a very old, woman, who peered out at
+us through a break in the wall.  He called out to her in French, but she
+never answered--only continued to watch him from behind her shelter. He
+started toward her and she disappeared noiselessly, without having
+spoken a word. She was the only living person we saw in that town.
+
+Just beyond the town, though, we met a wagon--a furniture dealer's
+wagon--from some larger community, which had been impressed by the
+Belgian authorities, military or civil, for ambulance service.  A jaded
+team of horses drew it, and white flags with red crosses in their
+centers drooped over the wheels, fore and aft.  One man led the near
+horse by the bit and two other men walked behind the wagon.  All three
+of them had Red Cross brassards on the sleeves of their coats.
+
+The wagon had a hood on it, but was open at both ends.  Overhauling it
+we saw that it contained two dead soldiers--French foot-soldiers.  The
+bodies rested side by side on the wagon bed.  Their feet somehow were
+caught up on the wagon seat so that their stiff legs, in the baggy red
+pants, slanted upward, and the two dead men had the look of being about
+to glide backward and out of the wagon.
+
+The blue-clad arms of one of them were twisted upward in a half-arc,
+encircling nothing; and as the wheels jolted over the rutted cobbles
+these two bent arms joggled and swayed drunkenly.  The other's head was
+canted back so that, as we passed, we looked right into his face.  It
+was a young face--we could tell that much, even through the mask of
+caked mud on the drab-white skin--and it might once have been a comely
+face.  It was not comely now.
+
+Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly
+shot or shorn away--the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an
+abominable thing to look on. These two had been men the day before.  Now
+they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we
+saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red
+poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected
+sugar beets.
+
+We stopped and watched.  The wagon bumped through the beet patch to
+where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug.  The diggers
+were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw
+upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a
+painting by Millet.  Their spades were speared upright into the mound of
+fresh earth.  Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky
+line.
+
+We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon.  We saw them slide into the
+shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in
+the hole.
+
+Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to
+the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us.  There was one detached
+house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the
+field where the burial took place.  It had a shield on its front wall
+bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs
+house.
+
+A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French boundary
+came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road.  Had the gravediggers
+picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two
+dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.
+
+The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise
+through the elm-tree aisles along our route.  Just as it disappeared we
+met a string of refugees--men, women and children--all afoot, all
+bearing pitiably small bundles.  They limped along silently in a
+straggling procession.  None of them was weeping; none of them
+apparently had been weeping.  During the past ten days I had seen
+thousands of such refugees, and I had yet to hear one of them cry out or
+complain or protest.
+
+These who passed us now were like that.  Their heavy peasant faces
+expressed dumb bewilderment--nothing else.  They went on up the road
+into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound of
+their clunking tread died out behind us. Without knowing certainly, we
+nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of Montignies St.
+Christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.
+
+An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp and
+entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a German
+army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main force of
+the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well beyond the
+frontier.  France was invaded.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 2
+
+To War in a Taxicab
+
+
+In a taxicab we went to look for this war.  There were four of us, not
+counting the chauffeur, who did not count.  It was a regular taxicab,
+with a meter on it, and a little red metal flag which might be turned up
+or turned down, depending on whether the cab was engaged or at liberty;
+and he was a regular chauffeur.
+
+We, the passengers, wore straw hats and light suits, and carried no
+baggage.  No one would ever have taken us for war correspondents out
+looking for war.  So we went; and, just when we were least expecting it,
+we found that war.  Perhaps it would be more exact to say it found us.
+We were four days getting back to Brussels, still wearing our straw
+hats, but without any taxicab.  The fate of that taxicab is going to be
+one of the unsolved mysteries of the German invasion of Belgium.
+
+From the hour when the steamer St. Paul left New York, carrying probably
+the most mixed assortment of passengers that traveled on a single ship
+since Noah sailed the Ark, we on board expected hourly to sight
+something that would make us spectators of actual hostilities.  The
+papers that morning were full of rumors of an engagement between English
+ships and German ships somewhere off the New England coast.
+
+Daily we searched the empty seas until our eyes hurt us; but, except
+that we had one ship's concert and one brisk gale, and that just before
+dusk on the fifth day out, the weather being then gray and misty, we saw
+wallowing along, hull down on the starboard bow, an English cruiser with
+two funnels, nothing happened at all.  Even when we landed at Liverpool
+nothing happened to suggest that we had reached a country actively
+engaged in war, unless you would list the presence of a few khaki-clad
+soldiers on the landing stage and the painful absence of porters to
+handle our baggage as evidences of the same.  I remember seeing Her
+Grace the Duchess of Marlborough sitting hour after hour on a baggage
+truck, waiting for her heavy luggage to come off the tardy tender and up
+the languid chute into the big dusty dockhouse.
+
+I remember, also, seeing women, with their hats flopping down in their
+faces and their hair all streaming, dragging huge trunks across the
+floor; and if all of us had not been in the same distressful fix we
+could have appreciated the humor of the spectacle of a portly high
+dignitary of the United States Medical Corps shoving a truck piled high
+with his belongings, and shortly afterward, with the help of his own
+wife, loading them on the roof of an infirm and wheezy taxicab.
+
+From Liverpool across to London we traveled through a drowsy land
+burdened with bumper crops of grain, and watched the big brown hares
+skipping among the oat stacks; and late at night we came to London.  In
+London next day there were more troops about than common, and recruits
+were drilling on the gravel walks back of Somerset House; and the people
+generally moved with a certain sober restraint, as people do who feel
+the weight of a heavy and an urgent responsibility.  Otherwise the
+London of wartime seemed the London of peacetime.
+
+So within a day our small party, still seeking to slip into the wings of
+the actual theater of events rather than to stay so far back behind the
+scenes, was aboard a Channel ferryboat bound for Ostend, and having for
+fellow travelers a few Englishmen, a tall blond princess of some royal
+house of Northern Europe, and any number of Belgians going home to
+enlist. In the Straits of Dover, an hour or so out from Folkestone, we
+ran through a fleet of British warships guarding the narrow roadstead
+between France and England; and a torpedo-boat destroyer sidled up and
+took a look at us.
+
+Just off Dunkirk a French scout ship talked with us by the language of
+the whipping signal flags; but the ordinary Channel craft came and went
+without hindrance or seeming fear, and again it was hard for us to make
+ourselves believe that we had reached a zone where the physical,
+tangible business of war went forward.
+
+And Ostend and, after Ostend, the Belgian interior--those were
+disappointments too; for at Ostend bathers disported on the long,
+shining beach and children played about the sanded stretch.  And, though
+there were soldiers in sight, one always expects soldiers in European
+countries.  No one asked to see the passports we had brought with us,
+and the customs officers gave our hand baggage the most perfunctory of
+examinations. Hardly five minutes had elapsed after our landing before
+we were steaming away on our train through a landscape which, to judge
+by its appearance, might have known only peace, and naught but peace,
+for a thousand placid years.
+
+It is true we saw during that ride few able-bodied male adults, either
+in the towns through which we rushed or in the country.  There were
+priests occasionally and old, infirm men or half-grown boys; but of men
+in their prime the land had been drained to fill up the army of defense
+then on the other side of Belgium--toward Germany--striving to hold the
+invaders in check until the French and English might come up.  The
+yellow-ripe grain stood in the fields, heavy-headed and drooping with
+seed.  The russet pears and red apples bent the limbs of the fruit trees
+almost to earth.  Every visible inch of soil was under cultivation, of
+the painfully intensive European sort; and there remained behind to
+garner the crops only the peasant women and a few crippled, aged grand-
+sires.  It was hard for us to convince ourselves that any event out of
+the ordinary beset this country. No columns of troops passed along the
+roads; no camps of tents lifted their peaked tops above the hedges.  In
+seventy-odd miles we encountered one small detachment of soldiers--they
+were at a railroad station--and one Red Cross flag.
+
+As for Brussels--why, Brussels at first glance was more like a city
+making a fete than the capital of a nation making war.  The flags which
+were displayed everywhere; the crowds in the square before the railroad
+station; the multitudes of boy scouts running about; the uniforms of
+Belgian volunteers and regulars; the Garde Civique, in their queer-
+looking costumes, with funny little derby hats, all braid-trimmed--gave
+to the place a holiday air.  After nightfall, when the people of
+Brussels flocked to the sidewalk cafes and sat at little round tables
+under awnings, drinking light drinks a la Parisienne, this impression
+was heightened.
+
+We dined in the open air ourselves, finding the prices for food and
+drink to be both moderate and modest, and able to see nothing on the
+surface which suggested that the life of these people had been seriously
+disturbed.  Two significant facts, however, did obtrude themselves on
+us: Every minute or two, as we dined, a young girl or an old gentleman
+would come to us, rattling a tin receptacle with a slot in the top
+through which coins for the aid of the widows and orphans of dead
+soldiers might be dropped; and when a little later we rode past the
+royal palace we saw that it had been converted into a big hospital for
+the wounded.  That night, also, the government ran away to Antwerp; but
+of this we knew nothing until the following morning.
+
+Next day we heard tales: Uhlans had been seen almost in the suburbs;
+three German spies, disguised as nuns, had been captured, tried,
+convicted and were no longer with us; sentries on duty outside the
+residence of the American Minister had fired at a German aeroplane
+darting overhead; French troops were drawing in to the northward and
+English soldiers were hurrying up from the south; trainloads of wounded
+had been brought in under cover of the night and distributed among the
+improvised hospitals; but, conceding these things to be true, we knew of
+them only at second hand.  By the evidence of what we ourselves saw we
+were able to note few shifts in the superficial aspects of the city.
+
+The Garde Civique seemed a trifle more numerous than it had been the
+evening before; citizen volunteers, still in civilian garb, appeared on
+the streets in awkward squads, carrying their guns and side arms
+clumsily; and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out the
+beautiful Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high
+barricade across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois;
+also, they were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade trees.
+That was all.
+
+And then, as though to offset these added suggestions of danger, we saw
+children playing about quietly behind the piled sand-bags, guarded by
+plump Flemish nursemaids, and smart dogcarts constantly passed and
+repassed us, filled with well-dressed women, and with flowers stuck in
+the whip-sockets.
+
+The nearer we got to this war the farther away from us it seemed to be.
+We began to regard it as an elusive, silent, secretive, hide-and-go-seek
+war, which would evade us always.  We resolved to pursue it into the
+country to the northward, from whence the Germans were reported to be
+advancing, crushing back the outnumbered Belgians as they came onward;
+but when we tried to secure a laissez passer at the gendarmerie, where
+until then an accredited correspondent might get himself a laissez
+passer, we bumped into obstacles.
+
+In an inclosed courtyard behind a big gray building, among loaded wagons
+of supplies and munching cart horses, a kitchen table teetered
+unsteadily on its legs on the rough cobbles.  On the table were pens and
+inkpots and coffee cups and beer bottles and beer glasses; and about it
+sat certain unkempt men in resplendent but unbrushed costumes. Joseph
+himself--the Joseph of the coat of many colors, no less--might have
+devised the uniforms they wore.  With that setting the picture they made
+there in the courtyard was suggestive of stage scenes in plays of the
+French Revolution.
+
+They were polite enough, these piebald gentlemen, and they considered
+our credentials with an air of mildly courteous interest; but they would
+give us no passes.  There had been an order.  Who had issued it, or why,
+was not for us to know.  Going away from there, all downcast and
+disappointed, we met a French cavalryman.  He limped along in his high
+dragoon boots, walking with the wide-legged gait of one who had
+bestraddled leather for many hours and was sore from it.  His horse,
+which he led by the bridle, stumbled with weariness.  A proud boy scout
+was serving as his guide.  He was the only soldier of any army, except
+the Belgian, we had seen so far, and we halted our car and watched him
+until he disappeared.
+
+However, seeing one tired French dragoon was not seeing the war; and we
+chafed that night at the delay which kept us penned as prisoners in this
+handsome, outwardly quiet city.  As we figured it we might be housed up
+here for days or weeks and miss all the operations in the field.  When
+morning came, though, we discovered that the bars were down again, and
+that certificates signed by the American consul would be sufficient to
+carry us as far as the outlying suburbs at least.
+
+Securing these precious papers, then, without delay we chartered a
+rickety red taxicab for the day; and piling in we told the driver to
+take us eastward as far as he could go before the outposts turned us
+back.  He took us, therefore, at a buzzing clip through the Bois, along
+one flank of the magnificent Forest of Soigne, with its miles of green-
+trunked beech trees, and by way of the royal park of Tervueren.  From
+the edge of the thickly settled district onward we passed barricade
+after barricade--some built of newly felled trees; some of street cars
+drawn across the road in double rows; some of street cobbles chinked
+with turf; and some of barbed wire--all of them, even to our
+inexperienced eyes, seeming but flimsy defenses to interpose against a
+force of any size or determination.  But the Belgians appeared to set
+great store by these playthings.
+
+Behind each of them was a mixed group of soldiers--Garde Civique,
+gendarmes and burgher volunteers.  These latter mainly carried shotguns
+and wore floppy blue caps and long blue blouses, which buttoned down
+their backs with big horn buttons, like little girls' pinafores.  There
+was, we learned, a touch of sentiment about the sudden appearance of
+those most unsoldierly looking vestments.  In the revolution of 1830,
+when the men of Brussels fought the Hollanders all morning, stopped for
+dinner at midday and then fought again all afternoon, and by alternately
+fighting and eating wore out the enemy and won their national
+independence, they wore such caps and such back-buttoning blouses.  And
+so all night long women in the hospitals had sat up cutting out and
+basting together the garments of glory for their menfolk.
+
+No one offered to turn us back, and only once or twice did a sentry
+insist on looking at our passes.  In the light of fuller experiences I
+know now that when a city is about to fall into an enemy's hands the
+authorities relax their vigilance and freely permit noncombatants to
+depart therefrom, presumably on the assumption that the fewer
+individuals there are in the place when the conqueror does come the
+fewer the problems of caring for the resident population will be.  But
+we did not know this mighty significant fact; and, suspecting nothing,
+the four innocents drove blithely on until the city lay behind us and
+the country lay before us, brooding in the bright sunlight and all empty
+and peaceful, except for thin scattering detachments of gaily clad
+Belgian infantrymen through which we passed.
+
+Once or twice tired, dirty stragglers, lying at the roadside, raised a
+cheer as they recognized the small American flag that fluttered from our
+taxi's door; and once we gave a lift to a Belgian bicycle courier, who
+had grown too leg-weary to pedal his machine another inch.  He was the
+color of the dust through which he had ridden, and his face under its
+dirt mask was thin and drawn with fatigue; but his racial enthusiasm
+endured, and when we dropped him he insisted on shaking hands with all
+of us, and offering us a drink out of a very warm and very grimy bottle
+of something or other.
+
+All of a sudden, rounding a bend, we came on a little valley with one of
+the infrequent Belgian brooks bisecting it; and this whole valley was
+full of soldiers.  There must have been ten thousand of them--cavalry,
+foot, artillery, baggage trains, and all.  Quite near us was ranged a
+battery of small rapid-fire guns; and the big rawboned dogs that had
+hauled them there were lying under the wicked-looking little pieces.  We
+had heard a lot about the dog-drawn guns of the Belgians, but these were
+the first of them we had seen.
+
+Lines of cavalrymen were skirting crosswise over the low hill at the
+other side of the valley, and against the sky line the figures of horses
+and men stood out clear and fine.  It all seemed a splendid martial
+sight; but afterward, comparing this force with the army into whose
+front we were to blunder unwittingly, we thought of it as a little
+handful of toy soldiers playing at war.  We never heard what became of
+those Belgians.  Presumably at the advance of the Germans coming down on
+them countlessly, like an Old Testament locust plague, they fell back
+and, going round Brussels, went northward toward Antwerp, to join the
+main body of their own troops.  Or they may have reached the lines of
+the Allies, to the south and westward, toward the French frontier.  One
+guess would be as good as the other.
+
+One of the puzzling things about the early mid-August stages of the war
+was the almost instantaneous rapidity with which the Belgian army, as an
+army, disintegrated and vanished.  To-day it was here, giving a good
+account of itself against tremendous odds, spending itself in driblets
+to give the Allies a chance to get up.  To-morrow it was utterly gone.
+
+Still without being halted or delayed we went briskly on.  We had topped
+the next rise commanding the next valley, and--except for a few
+stragglers and some skirmishers--the Belgians were quite out of sight,
+when our driver stopped with an abruptness which piled his four
+passengers in a heap and pointed off to the northwest, a queer,
+startled, frightened look on his broad Flemish face.  There was smoke
+there along the horizon--much smoke, both white and dark; and, even as
+the throb of the motor died away to a purr, the sound of big guns came
+to us in a faint rumbling, borne from a long way off by the breeze.
+
+It was the first time any one of us, except McCutcheon, had ever heard a
+gun fired in battle; and it was the first intimation to any of us that
+the Germans were so near.  Barring only venturesome mounted scouts we
+had supposed the German columns were many kilometers away.  A brush
+between skirmishers was the best we had counted on seeing.
+
+Right here we parted from our taxi driver.  He made it plain to us,
+partly by words and partly by signs, that he personally was not looking
+for any war.  Plainly he was one who specialized in peace and the
+pursuits of peace.  Not even the proffered bribe of a doubled or a
+tripled fare availed to move him one rod toward those smoke clouds.  He
+turned his car round so that it faced toward Brussels, and there he
+agreed to stay, caring for our light overcoats, until we should return
+to him.  I wonder how long he really did stay.
+
+And I have wondered, in idle moments since, what he did with our
+overcoats.  Maybe he fled with the automobile containing two English
+moving-picture operators which passed us at that moment, and from which
+floated back a shouted warning that the Germans were coming.  Maybe he
+stayed too long and was gobbled up--but I doubt it.  He had an instinct
+for safety.
+
+As we went forward afoot the sound of the firing grew clearer and more
+distinct.  We could now hear quite plainly the grunting belch of the big
+pieces and, in between, the chattering voice of rapid-fire guns.  Long-
+extended, stammering, staccato sounds, which we took to mean rifle
+firing, came to our ears also.  Among ourselves we decided that the
+white smoke came from the guns and the black from burning buildings or
+hay ricks.  Also we agreed that the fighting was going on beyond the
+spires and chimneys of a village on the crest of the hill immediately
+ahead of us.  We could make out a white church and, on past it, lines of
+gray stone cottages.
+
+In these deductions we were partly right and partly wrong; we had hit on
+the approximate direction of the fighting, but it was not a village that
+lay before us.  What we saw was an outlying section of the city of
+Louvain, a place of fifty thousand inhabitants, destined within ten days
+to be turned into a waste of sacked ruins.
+
+There were fields of tall, rank winter cabbages on each side of the
+road, and among the big green leaves we saw bright red dots.  We had to
+look a second time before we realized that these dots were not the
+blooms of the wild red poppies that are so abundant in Belgium, but the
+red-tipped caps of Belgian soldiers squatting in the cover of the
+plants.  None of them looked toward us; all of them looked toward those
+mounting walls of smoke.
+
+Now, too, we became aware of something else--aware of a procession that
+advanced toward us.  It was the head of a two-mile long line of
+refugees, fleeing from destroyed or threatened districts on beyond.  At
+first, in scattered, straggling groups, and then in solid columns, they
+passed us unendingly, we going one way, they going the other.  Mainly
+they were afoot, though now and then a farm wagon would bulk above the
+weaving ranks; and it would be loaded with bedding and furniture and
+packed to overflowing with old women and babies.  One wagon lacked
+horses to draw it, and six men pulled in front while two men pushed at
+the back to propel it.  Some of the fleeing multitude looked like
+townspeople, but the majority plainly were peasants.  And of these
+latter at least half wore wooden shoes so that the sound of their feet
+on the cobbled roadbed made a clattering chorus that at times almost
+drowned out the hiccuping voices of the guns behind them.
+
+Occasionally there would be a man shoving a barrow, with a baby and
+possibly a muddle of bedclothing in the barrow together.  Every woman
+carried a burden of some sort, which might be a pack tied in a cloth or
+a cheap valise stuffed to bursting, or a baby--though generally it was
+a baby; and nearly every man, in addition to his load of belongings, had
+an umbrella under his arm.  In this rainy land the carrying of umbrellas
+is a habit not easily shaken off; and, besides, most of these people had
+slept out at least one night and would probably sleep out another, and
+an umbrella makes a sort of shelter if you have no better.  I figure I
+saw a thousand umbrellas if I saw one, and the sight of them gave a
+strangely incongruous touch to the thing.
+
+Yes, it gave a grotesque touch to it.  The spectacle inclined one to
+laugh, almost making one forget for a moment that here in this spectacle
+one beheld the misery of war made concrete; that in the lorn state of
+these poor folks its effects were focused and made vivid; that, while in
+some way it touched every living creature on the globe, here it touched
+them directly.
+
+All the children, except the sick ones and the very young ones, walked,
+and most of them carried small bundles too.  I saw one little girl, who
+was perhaps six years old, with a heavy wooden clock in her arms.  The
+legs of the children wavered under them sometimes from weakness or maybe
+weariness, but I did not hear a single child whimper, or see a single
+woman who wept, or hear a single man speak above a half whisper.
+
+They drifted on by us, silent all, except for the sound of feet and
+wheels; and, as I read the looks on their faces, those faces expressed
+no emotion except a certain numbed, resigned, bovine bewilderment.  Far
+back in the line we met two cripples, hobbling along side by side as
+though for company, and still farther back a Belgian soldier came, like
+a rear guard, with his gun swung over his back and his sweaty black hair
+hanging down in his eyes.
+
+In an undertone he was apparently explaining something to a little
+bow-legged man in black, with spectacles, who trudged along in his
+company. He was the lone soldier we saw among the refugees--all the
+others were civilians.
+
+Only one man in all the line hailed us.  Speaking so low that we could
+scarcely catch his words, he said in broken English:
+
+"M'sieurs, the French are in Brussels, are they not?"
+
+"No," we told him.
+
+"The British, then--they must be there by now?"
+
+"No; the British aren't there, either."
+
+He shook his head, as though puzzled, and started on.
+
+"How far away are the Germans?" we asked him.
+
+He shook his head again.  "I cannot say," he answered; "but I think they
+must be close behind us.  I had a brother in the army at Liege," he
+added, apparently apropos of nothing.  And then he went on, still
+shaking his head and with both arms tightly clasped round a big bundle
+done up in cloth, which he held against his breast.
+
+Very suddenly the procession broke off, as though it had been chopped in
+two; and almost immediately after that the road turned into a street and
+we were between solid lines of small cottages, surrounded on all sides
+by people who fluttered about with the distracted aimlessness of
+agitated barnyard fowls.  They babbled among themselves, paying small
+heed to us.  An automobile tore through the street with its horn
+blaring, and raced by us, going toward Brussels at forty miles an hour.
+A well-dressed man in the front seat yelled out something to us as he
+whizzed past, but the words were swallowed up in the roaring of his
+engine.
+
+Of our party only one spoke French, and he spoke it indifferently.  We
+sought, therefore, to find some one who understood English.  In a minute
+we saw the black robe of a priest; and here, through the crowd, calm and
+dignified where all others were fairly befuddled with excitement, he
+came--a short man with a fuzzy red beard and a bright blue eye.
+
+We hailed him, and the man who spoke a little French explained our case.
+At once he turned about and took us into a side street; and even in
+their present state the men and women who met us remembered their
+manners and pulled off their hats and bowed before him.
+
+At a door let into a high stone wall he stopped and rang a bell.  A
+brother in a brown robe came and unbarred the gate for us, and our guide
+led us under an arched alley and out again into the open; and behold we
+were in another world from the little world of panic that we had just
+left.  There was a high-walled inclosure with a neglected tennis court
+in the middle, and pear and plum trees burdened with fruit; and at the
+far end, beneath a little arbor of vines, four priests were sitting
+together.  At sight of us they rose and came to us, and shook hands all
+round.  Almost before we knew it we were in a bare little room behind
+the ancient Church of Saint Jacques, and one of the fathers was showing
+us a map in order that we might better understand the lay of the land;
+and another was uncorking a bottle of good red wine, which he brought up
+from the cellar, with a halo of mold on the cork and a mantle of cobwebs
+on its sloping shoulders.
+
+It seemed that the Rev. Dom. Marie-Joseph Montaigne--I give the name
+that was on his card--could speak a little English.  He told us
+haltingly that the smoke we had seen came from a scene of fighting
+somewhere to the eastward of Louvain.  He understood that the Prussians
+were quite near, but he had seen none himself and did not expect they
+would enter the town before nightfall.  As for the firing, that appeared
+to have ceased.  And, sure enough, when we listened we could no longer
+catch the sound of the big guns.  Nor did we hear them again during that
+day.  Over his glass the priest spoke in his faulty English, stopping
+often to feel for a word; and when he had finished his face worked and
+quivered with the emotion he felt.
+
+"This war--it is a most terrible thing that it should come on Belgium,
+eh? Our little country had no quarrel with any great country.  We
+desired only that we should be left alone.
+
+"Our people here--they are not bad people.  I tell you they are very
+good people.  All the week they work and work, and on Sunday they go to
+church; and then maybe they take a little walk.
+
+"You Americans now--you come from a very great country.  Surely, if the
+worst should come America will not let our country perish from off the
+earth, eh! Is not that so?"
+
+Fifteen minutes later we were out again facing the dusty little square
+of Saint Jacques; and now of a sudden peace seemed to have fallen on the
+place.  The wagons of a little traveling circus were ranged in the
+middle of the square with no one about to guard them; and across the way
+was a small tavern.
+
+All together we discovered we were hungry.  We had had bread and cheese
+and coffee, and were lighting some very bad native cigars, when the
+landlord burst in on us, saying in a quavering voice that some one
+passing had told him a squad of seven German troopers had been seen in
+the next street but one.  He made a gesture as though to invoke the
+mercy of Heaven on us all, and ran out again, casting a carpet slipper
+in his flight and leaving it behind him on the floor.
+
+So we followed, not in the least believing that any Germans had really
+been sighted; but in the street we saw a group of perhaps fifty Belgian
+soldiers running up a narrow sideway, trailing their gun butts behind
+them on the stones.  We figured they were hurrying forward to the other
+side of town to help hold back the enemy.
+
+A minute later seven or eight more soldiers crossed the road ahead of us
+and darted up an alley with the air and haste of men desirous of being
+speedily out of sight.  We had gone perhaps fifty feet beyond the mouth
+of this alley when two men, one on horseback and one on a bicycle, rode
+slowly and sedately out of another alley, parallel to the first one, and
+swung about with their backs to us.
+
+I imagine we had watched the newcomers for probably fifty seconds before
+it dawned on any of us that they wore gray helmets and gray coats, and
+carried arms--and were Germans.  Precisely at that moment they both
+turned so that they faced us; and the man on horseback lifted a carbine
+from a holster and half swung it in our direction.
+
+Realization came to us that here we were, pocketed.  There were armed
+Belgians in an alley behind us and armed Germans in the street before
+us; and we were nicely in between.  If shooting started the enemies
+might miss each other, but they could not very well miss us.  Two of our
+party found a courtyard and ran through it.  The third pressed close up
+against a house front and I made for the half-open door of a shop.
+
+Just as I reached it a woman on the inside slammed it in my face and
+locked it.  I never expect to see her again; but that does not mean that
+I ever expect to forgive her.  The next door stood open, and from within
+its shelter I faced about to watch for what might befall.  Nothing
+befell except that the Germans rode slowly past me, both vigilantly keen
+in poise and look, both with weapons unshipped.
+
+I got an especially good view of the cavalry.  He was a tall, lean,
+blond young man, man with a little yellow mustache and high cheekbones
+like an Indian's; and he was sunburned until he was almost as red as an
+Indian.  The sight of that limping French dragoon the day before had
+made me think of a picture by Meissonier or Detaille, but this German
+put me in mind of one of Frederic Remington's paintings.  Change his
+costume a bit, and substitute a slouch hat for his flat-topped lancer's
+cap, and he might have cantered bodily out of one of Remington's
+canvases.
+
+He rode past me--he and his comrade on the wheel--and in an instant they
+were gone into another street, and the people who had scurried to cover
+at their coming were out again behind them, with craned necks and
+startled faces.
+
+Our group reassembled itself somehow and followed after those two
+Germans who could jog along so serenely through a hostile town.  We did
+not crowd them--our health forbade that--but we now desired above all
+things to get back to our taxicab, two miles or more away, before our
+line of retreat should be cut off.  But we had tarried too long at our
+bread and cheese.
+
+When we came to where the street leading to the Square of Saint Jacques
+joined the street that led in turn to the Brussels road, all the people
+there were crouching in their doorways as quiet as so many mice, all
+looking in the direction in which we hoped to go, all pointing with
+their hands.  No one spoke, but the scuffle of wooden-shod feet on the
+flags made a sliding, slithering sound, which someway carried a message
+of warning more forcible than any shouted word or sudden shriek.
+
+We looked where their fingers aimed, and, as we looked, a hundred feet
+away through a cloud of dust a company of German foot soldiers swung
+across an open grassplot, where a little triangular park was, and
+straightened out down the road to Brussels, singing snatches of a German
+marching song as they went.
+
+And behind them came trim officers on handsome, high-headed horses, and
+more infantry; then a bicycle squad; then cavalry, and then a light
+battery, bumping along over the rutted stones, with white dust blowing
+back from under its wheels in scrolls and pennons.
+
+Then a troop of Uhlans came, with nodding lances, following close behind
+the guns; and at sight of them a few men and women, clustered at the
+door of a little wine shop calling itself the Belgian Lion, began to
+hiss and mutter, for among these people, as we knew already, the Uhlans
+had a hard name.
+
+At that a noncommissioned officer--a big man with a neck on him like a
+bison and a red, broad, menacing face--turned in his saddle and dropped
+the muzzle of his black automatic on them.  They sucked their hisses
+back down their frightened gullets so swiftly that the exertion
+well-nigh choked them, and shrank flat against the wall; and, for all
+the sound that came from them until he had holstered his hardware and
+trotted on, they might have been dead men and women.
+
+Just then, from perhaps half a mile on ahead, a sharp clatter of rifle
+fire sounded--pop! pop! pop!--and then a rattling volley.  We saw the
+Uhlans snatch out their carbines and gallop forward past the battery
+into the dust curtain.  And as it swallowed them up we, who had come in
+a taxicab looking for the war, knew that we had found it; and knew, too,
+that our chances of ever seeing that taxicab again were most exceeding
+small.
+
+We had one hope--that this might merely be a reconnaissance in force,
+and that when it turned back or turned aside we might yet slip through
+and make for Brussels afoot.  But it was no reconnaissance--it was
+Germany up and moving.  We stayed in Louvain three days, and for three
+days we watched the streaming past of the biggest army we had ever seen,
+and the biggest army beleaguered Belgium had ever seen, and one of the
+biggest, most perfect armies the world has ever seen.  We watched the
+gray-clad columns pass until the mind grew numb at the prospect of
+computing their number.  To think of trying to count them was like
+trying to count the leaves on a tree or the pebbles on a path.
+
+They came and came, and kept on coming, and their iron-shod feet flailed
+the earth to powder, and there was no end to them.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 3
+
+Sherman Said It
+
+
+Undoubtedly Sherman said it.  This is my text and as illustration for
+my text I take the case of the town of La Buissiere.
+
+The Germans took the town of La Buissiere after stiff fighting on August
+twenty-fourth.  I imagine that possibly there was a line in the
+dispatches telling of the fight there; but at that I doubt it, because
+on that same date a few miles away a real battle was raging between the
+English rear guard, under Sir John French, of the retreating army of the
+Allies, falling back into France, and the Germans.  Besides, in the sum
+total of this war the fall of La Buissiere hardly counts.  You might say
+it represents a semicolon in the story of the campaign.  Probably no
+future historian will give it so much as a paragraph. In our own Civil
+War it would have been worth a page in the records anyway.  Here upward
+of three hundred men on both sides were killed and wounded, and as many
+more Frenchmen were captured; and the town, when taken, gave the winners
+the control of the river Sambre for many miles east and west. Here,
+also, was a German charge with bayonets up a steep and well-defended
+height; and after that a hand-to-hand melee with the French defenders on
+the poll of the hill.
+
+But this war is so big a thing, as wars go, that an engagement of this
+size is likely to be forgotten in a day or a week.  Yet, I warrant you,
+the people of La Buissiere will not forget it.  Nor shall we forget it
+who came that way in the early afternoon of a flawless summer day.  Let
+me try to recreate La Buissiere for you, reader.  Here the Sambre, a
+small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized
+creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and
+weSt. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond
+like the rim of a saucer.  The town--most of it--is on this side.  On
+the south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy
+feet high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau,
+where trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander
+between fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar
+beets.  As for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people--
+Walloons and Flemish folk--living in tall, bleak, stone houses built
+flush with the little crooked streets.  Invariably these houses are of a
+whitish gray color; almost invariably they are narrow and cramped-
+looking, with very peaky gables, somehow suggesting flat-chested old men
+standing in close rows, with their hands in their pockets and their
+shoulders shrugged up.
+
+A canal bisects one corner of the place, and spanning the river there
+are--or were--three bridges, one for the railroad and two for foot and
+vehicular travel.  There is a mill which overhangs the river--the
+biggest building in the town--and an ancient gray convent, not quite so
+large as the mill; and, of course, a church.  In most of the houses
+there are tiny shops on the lower floors, and upstairs are the homes of
+the people.  On the northern side of the stream every tillable foot of
+soil is under cultivation.  There are flower beds, and plum and pear
+trees in the tiny grass plots alongside the more pretentious houses, and
+the farm lands extend to where the town begins.
+
+This, briefly, is La Buissiere as it looked before the war began--a
+little, drowsy settlement of dull, frugal, hard-working, kindly
+Belgians, minding their own affairs, prospering in their own small way,
+and having no quarrel with the outside world.  They lived in the only
+corner of Europe that I know of where serving people decline to accept
+tips for rendering small services; and in a simple, homely fashion are,
+I think, the politest, the most courteous, the most accommodating human
+beings on the face of the earth.
+
+Even their misery did not make them forget their manners, as we found
+when we came that way, close behind the conquerors.  It was only the
+refugees, fleeing from their homes or going back to them again, who were
+too far spent to lift their caps in answer to our hails, and too
+miserably concerned with their own ruined affairs, or else too afraid of
+inquisitive strangers, to answer the questions we sometimes put to them.
+
+We were three days getting from Brussels to La Buissiere--a distance, I
+suppose, of about forty-five English miles.  There were no railroads and
+no trams for us.  The lines were held by the Germans or had been
+destroyed by the Allies as they fell back.  Nor were there automobiles
+to be had.  Such automobiles as were not hidden had been confiscated by
+one side or the other.
+
+Moreover, our journey was a constant succession of stops and starts.
+Now we would be delayed for half an hour while some German officer
+examined the passes we carried, he meantime eying us with his suspicious
+squinted eyes.  Now again we would halt to listen to some native's story
+of battle or reprisal on ahead.  And always there was the everlasting
+dim reverberation of the distant guns to draw us forward.  And always,
+too, there was the difficulty of securing means of transportation.
+
+It was on Sunday afternoon, August twenty-third, when we left Brussels,
+intending to ride to Waterloo.  There were six of us, in two ancient
+open carriages designed like gravy boats and hauled by gaunt livery
+horses.  Though the Germans had held Brussels for four days now, life in
+the suburbs went on exactly as it goes on in the suburbs of a Belgian
+city in ordinary times.  There was nothing to suggest war or a captured
+city in the family parties sitting at small tables before the outlying
+cafes or strolling decorously under the trees that shaded every road.
+Even the Red Cross flags hanging from the windows of many of the larger
+houses seemed for once in keeping with the peaceful picture.  Of Germans
+during the afternoon we saw almost none.  Thick enough in the center of
+the town, the gray backs showed themselves hardly at all in the
+environs.
+
+At the city line a small guard lounged on benches before a wine shop.
+They stood up as we drew near, but changed their minds and squatted down
+without challenging us to produce the safe-conduct papers that Herr
+General Major Thaddeus von Jarotzky, sitting in due state in the ancient
+Hotel de Ville, had bestowed on us an hour before.
+
+Just before we reached Waterloo we saw in a field on the right, near the
+road, a small camp of German cavalry.  The big, round-topped yellow
+tents, sheltering twenty men each and looking like huge tortoises, stood
+in a line.  From the cook-wagons, modeled on the design of those carried
+by an American circus, came the heavy, meaty smells of stews boiling in
+enormous caldrons.  The men were lying or sitting on straw piles,
+singing German marching songs as they waited for their supper.  It was
+always so--whenever and wherever we found German troops at rest they
+were singing, eating or drinking--or doing all three at once.  A German
+said to me afterwards:
+
+"Why do we win? Three things are winning for us--good marching, good
+shooting and good cooking; but most of all the cooking.  When our troops
+stop there is always plenty of hot food for them.  We never have to
+fight on an empty stomach--we Germans."
+
+These husky singers were the last Germans we were to see for many hours;
+for between the garrison force left behind in Brussels and the fast-
+moving columns hurrying to meet the English and the French and a few
+Belgians--on the morrow--a matter of many leagues now intervened.
+
+Evidence of the passing through of the troops was plentiful enough
+though.  We saw it in the trampled hedges; in the empty beer bottles
+that dotted the roadside ditches--empty bottles, as we had come to know,
+meant Germans on ahead; in the subdued, furtive attitude of the country
+folk, and, most of all, in the chalked legend, in stubby German script--
+"Gute Leute!"--on nearly every wine-shop shutter or cottage door.
+Soldiers quartered in such a house overnight had on leaving written this
+line--"Good people!"--to indicate the peaceful character of the
+dwellers therein and to commend them to the kindness of those who might
+follow after.
+
+The Lion of Waterloo, standing on its lofty green pyramid, was miles
+behind us before realization came that fighting had started that day to
+the southward of us.  We halted at a taverne to water the horses, and
+out came its Flemish proprietor, all gesticulations and exclamations, to
+tell us that since morning he had heard firing on ahead.
+
+"Ah, sirs," he said, "it was inconceivable--that sound of the guns.  It
+went on for hours. The whole world must be at war down the road!"
+
+The day before he had seen, flitting across the cabbage patches and
+dodging among the elm trees, a skirmish party, mounted, which he took to
+be English; and for two days, so he said, the Germans had been passing
+the tavern in numbers uncountable.
+
+We hurried on then, but as we met many peasants, all coming the other
+way afoot and all with excited stories of a supposed battle ahead, and
+as we ourselves now began to catch the faint reverberations of cannon
+fire, our drivers manifested a strange reluctance about proceeding
+farther.  And when, just at dusk, we clattered into the curious little
+convent-church town of Nivelles, and found the tiny square before the
+Black Eagle Inn full of refugees who had trudged in from towns beyond,
+the liverymen, after taking off their varnished high hats to scratch
+their preplexed heads, announced that Brussels was where they belonged
+and to Brussels they would return that night, though their spent horses
+dropped in the traces on the way.
+
+We supped that night at the Black Eagle--slept there too--and it was at
+supper we had as guests Raymond Putzeys, aged twelve, and Alfred, his
+father.  Except crumbs of chocolate and pieces of dry bread, neither of
+them had eaten for two days.
+
+The boy, who was a round-faced, handsome, dirty, polite little chap,
+said not a word except "Merci!" He was too busy clearing his plate clean
+as fast as we loaded it with ham and eggs and plum jam; and when he had
+eaten enough for three and could hold no more he went to sleep, with his
+tousled head among the dishes.
+
+The father between bites told us his tale--such a tale as we had heard
+dozens of times already and were to hear again a hundred times before
+that crowded week ended--he telling it with rolling eyes and lifting
+brows, and graphic and abundant gestures.  Behind him and us, penning
+our table about with a living hedge, stood the leading burghers of
+Nivelles, now listening to him, now watching us with curious eyes.  And,
+as he talked on, the landlord dimmed the oil lamps and made fast the
+door; for this town, being in German hands, was under martial law and
+must lock and bar itself in at eight o'clock each night.  So we sat in a
+half light and listened.
+
+They lived, the two Putzeys, at a hamlet named Marchienne-au-Pont, to
+the southward. The Germans had come into it the day before at sunup, and
+finding the French there had opened fire.  From the houses the French
+had replied until driven out by heavy odds, and then they ran across the
+fields, leaving many dead and wounded behind them.  As for the
+inhabitants they had, during the fighting, hidden in their cellars.
+
+"When the French were gone the Germans drove us out," went on the
+narrator; "and, of the men, they made several of us march ahead of them
+down the road into the next village, we holding up our hands and loudly
+begging those within the houses not to fire, for fear of killing us who
+were their friends and neighbors.  When this town surrendered the
+Germans let us go, but first one of them gave me a cake of chocolate.
+
+"Yet when I tried to go to aid a wounded Frenchman who lay in the
+fields, another German, I thought, fired at me.  I heard the bullet--it
+buzzed like a hornet.  So then I ran away and found my son here; and we
+came across the country, following the canals and avoiding the roads,
+which were filled with German troops.  When we had gone a mile we looked
+back and there was much thick smoke behind us--our houses were burning,
+I suppose.  So last night we slept in the woods and all day we walked,
+and to-night reached here, bringing with us nothing except the clothes
+on our backs.
+
+"I have no wife--she has been dead for two years--but in Brussels I have
+two daughters at school.  Do you think I shall be permitted to enter
+Brussels and seek for my two daughters? This morning they told me
+Brussels was burning; but that I do not believe."
+
+Then, also, he told us in quick, eager sentences, lowering his voice
+while he spoke, that a priest, with his hands tied behind his back, had
+been driven through a certain village ahead of the Germans, as a human
+shield for them; and that, in still another village, two aged women had
+been violated and murdered.  Had he beheld these things with his own
+eyes? No; he had been told of them.
+
+Here I might add that this was our commonest experience in questioning
+the refugees. Every one of them had a tale to tell of German atrocities
+on noncombatants; but not once did we find an avowed eye-witness to such
+things.  Always our informant had heard of the torturing or the maiming
+or the murdering, but never had he personally seen it.  It had always
+happened in another town--never in his own town.
+
+We hoped to hire fresh vehicles of some sort in Nivelles.  Indeed, a
+half-drunken burgher who spoke fair English, and who, because he had
+once lived in America, insisted on taking personal charge of our
+affairs, was constantly bustling in to say he had arranged for carriages
+and horses; but when the starting hour came--at five o'clock on Monday
+morning--there was no sign either of our fuddled guardian or of the rigs
+he had promised.  So we set out afoot, following the everlasting sound
+of the guns.
+
+After having many small adventures on the way we came at nightfall to
+Binche, a town given over to dullness and lacemaking, and once a year to
+a masked carnival, but which now was jammed with German supply trains,
+and by token of this latter circumstance filled with apprehensive
+townspeople.  But there had been no show of resistance here, and no
+houses had been burned; and the Germans were paying freely for what they
+took and treating the townspeople civilly.
+
+Indeed, all that day we had traveled through a district as yet unharried
+and unmolested. Though sundry hundreds of thousands of Germans had gone
+that way, no burnt houses or squandered fields marked their wake; and
+the few peasants who had not run away at the approach of the dreaded
+Allemands were back at work, trying to gather their crops in barrows or
+on their backs, since they had no work-cattle left.  For these the
+Germans had taken from them, to the last fit horse and the last colt.
+
+At Binche we laid up two nights and a day for the curing of our
+blistered feet.  Also, here we bought our two flimsy bicycles and our
+decrepit dogcart, and our still more decrepit mare to haul it; and, with
+this equipment, on Wednesday morning, bright and early, we made a fresh
+start, heading now toward Maubeuge, across the French boundary.
+
+Current rumor among the soldiers at Binche--for the natives, seemingly
+through fear for their own skins, would tell us nothing--was that at
+Maubeuge the onward-pressing Germans had caught up with the withdrawing
+columns of the Allies and were trying to bottle the stubborn English
+rear guard.  For once the gossip of the privates and the noncommissioned
+officers proved to be true.  There was fighting that day near Maubeuge--
+hard fighting and plenty of it; but, though we got within five miles of
+it, and heard the guns and saw the smoke from them, we were destined not
+to get there.
+
+Strung out, with the bicycles in front, we went down the straight white
+road that ran toward the frontier.  After an hour or two of steady going
+we began to notice signs of the retreat that had trailed through this
+section forty-eight hours before.  We picked up a torn shoulder strap,
+evidently of French workmanship, which had 13 embroidered on it in faded
+red tape; and we found, behind the trunk of a tree, a knapsack, new but
+empty, which was too light to have been part of a German soldier's
+equipment.
+
+We thought it was French; but now I think it must have been Belgian,
+because, as we subsequently discovered, a few scattering detachments of
+the Belgian foot soldiers who fled from Brussels on the eve of the
+occupation--disappearing so completely and so magically--made their way
+westward and southward to the French lines, toward Mons, and enrolled
+with the Allies in the last desperate effort to dam off and stem back
+the German torrent.
+
+Also, in a hedge, was a pair of new shoes, with their mouths gaping open
+and their latchets hanging down like tongues, as though hungering for
+feet to go into them.  But not a shred or scrap of German belongings--
+barring only the empty bottles--did we see.
+
+The marvelous German system, which is made up of a million small things
+to form one great, complete thing, ordained that never, either when
+marching or after camping, or even after fighting, should any object,
+however worthless, be discarded, lest it give to hostile eyes some hint
+as to the name of the command or the extent of its size.  These Germans
+we were trailing cleaned up behind themselves as carefully as New
+England housewives.
+
+It may have been the German love of order and regularity that induced
+them even to avoid trampling the ripe grain in the fields wherever
+possible.  Certainly, except when dealing out punishment, they did
+remarkably little damage, considering their numbers, along their line of
+march through this lowermost strip of Belgium.
+
+At Merbes-Ste.-Marie, a matter of six kilometers from Binche, we came on
+the first proof of seeming wantonness we encountered that day.  An old
+woman sat in a doorway of what had been a wayside wine shop, guarding
+the pitiable ruin of her stock and fixtures. All about her on the floor
+was a litter of foul straw, muddied by many feet and stained with
+spilled drink.  The stench from a bloated dead cavalry horse across the
+road poisoned the air.  The woman said a party of private soldiers,
+straying back from the main column, had despoiled her, taking what they
+pleased of her goods and in pure vandalism destroying what they could
+not use.
+
+Her shop was ruined, she said.  With a gesture of both arms, as though
+casting something from her, she expressed how utter and complete was her
+ruin.  Also she was hungry--she and her children--for the Germans had
+eaten all the food in the house and all the food in the houses of her
+neighbors.  We could not feed her, for we had no stock of provisions
+with us; but we gave her a five-franc piece and left her calling down
+the blessings of the saints on us in French-Flemish.
+
+The sister village of Merbes-le-Chateau, another kilometer farther on,
+revealed to us all its doors and many of its windows caved in by blows
+of gun butts and, at the nearer end of the principal street, five houses
+in smoking ruins.  A group of men and women were pawing about in the
+wreckage, seeking salvage.  They had saved a half-charred washstand, a
+scorched mattress, a clock and a few articles of women's wear; and these
+they had piled in a mound on the edge of the road.
+
+At first, not knowing who we were, they stood mute, replying to
+questions only with shrugged shoulders and lifted eyebrows; but when we
+made them realize that we were Americans they changed.  All were ready
+enough to talk then; they crowded about us, gesticulating and
+interrupting one another.  From the babble we gathered that the German
+skirmishers, coming in the strength of one company, had found an English
+cavalry squad in the town.  The English had swapped a few volleys with
+them, then had fallen back toward the river in good order and without
+loss.
+
+The Germans, pushing in, had burned certain outlying houses from which
+shots had come and burst open the rest. Also they had repeated the trick
+of capturing sundry luckless natives and, in their rush through the
+town, driving these prisoners ahead of them as living bucklers to
+minimize the danger of being shot at from the windows.
+
+One youth showed us a raw wound in his ear.  A piece of tile, splintered
+by an errant bullet, had pierced it, he said, as the Germans drove him
+before them.  Another man told us his father--and the father must have
+been an old man, for the speaker himself was in his fifties--had been
+shot through the thigh.  But had anybody been killed? That was what we
+wanted to know.  Ah, but yes! A dozen eager fingers pointed to the house
+immediately behind us.  There a man had been killed.
+
+Coming back to try to save some of their belongings after the Germans
+had gone through, these others had found him at the head of the cellar
+steps in his blazing house. His throat had been cut and his blood was on
+the floor, and he was dead.  They led us into the shell of the place,
+the stone walls being still staunchly erect; but the roof was gone, and
+in the cinders and dust on the planks of an inner room they showed us a
+big dull-brown smear.
+
+This, they told us, pointing, was the place where he lay.  One man in
+pantomime acted out the drama of the discovery of the body.  He was a
+born actor, that Belgian villager, and an orator--with his hands.
+Somehow, watching him, I visualized the victim as a little man, old and
+stoop-shouldered and feeble in his movements.
+
+I looked about the room.  The corner toward the road was a black ruin,
+but the back wall was hardly touched by the marks of the fire.
+
+On a mantel small bits of pottery stood intact, and a holy picture on
+the wall--a cheap print of a saint--was not even singed.  At the foot of
+the cellar steps curdled milk stood in pans; and beside the milk, on a
+table, was a half-moon of cheese and a long knife.
+
+We wanted to know why the man who lived here had been killed.  They
+professed ignorance then--none of them knew, or, at least, none of them
+would say.  A little later a woman told us she had heard the Germans
+caught him watching from a window with a pair of opera glasses, and on
+this evidence took him for a spy.  But we could secure no direct
+evidence either to confirm the tale or to disprove it.
+
+We got to the center of the town, leaving the venerable nag behind to be
+baited at a big gray barn by a big, shapeless, kindly woman hostler
+whose wooden shoes clattered on the round cobbles of her stable yard
+like drum taps.
+
+In the Square, after many citizens had informed us there was nothing to
+eat, a little Frenchwoman took pity on our emptiness, and, leading us to
+a parlor behind a shop where she sold, among other things, post cards,
+cheeses and underwear, she made us a huge omelet and gave us also good
+butter and fresh milk and a pot of her homemade marmalade.  Her two
+little daughters, who looked as though they had escaped from a Frans
+Hals canvas, waited on us while we wolfed the food down.
+
+Quite casually our hostess showed us a round hole in the window behind
+us, a big white scar in the wooden inner shutter and a flattened chunk
+of lead.  The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown,
+had fired a bullet through the window of her house.  It was proof of the
+rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to
+sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident
+quietly.  Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a
+stray bullet or two through her back window? So we interpreted her
+attitude.
+
+It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at Merbes-le-
+Chateau, but to go off at an angle to La Buissiere, where she had heard
+one bridge still stood.  She said nothing of a fight at that place.  It
+is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two towns almost
+touched.  Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the people so
+concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that they seemed
+not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or two miles away
+had fared.
+
+Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissiere to find
+the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also,
+and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on which
+we stumbled.
+
+Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond
+the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth
+with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which,
+after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and
+might become a pestilence.  When we told them we meant to enter La
+Buissiere they held up their soiled hands in protest.
+
+"There has been much fighting there," one said, "and many are dead, and
+more are dying.  Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we
+do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are
+full of Germans.  Hark, m'sieurs!"
+
+Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause, a
+second report.  We went forward cautiously across a bridge that spanned
+an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with broken
+windows, from which no sign or sound of life came. Suddenly at a turn
+three German privates of a lancer regiment faced us.  They were burdened
+with bottles of beer, and one carried his lance, which he flung
+playfully in our path.  He had been drinking and was jovially
+exhilarated.  As soon as he saw the small silk American flag that
+fluttered from the rail of our dogcart he and his friends became
+enthusiastic in their greetings, offering us beer and wanting to know
+whether the Americans meant to declare for Germany now that the Japanese
+had sided with England.
+
+Leaving them cheering for the Americans we negotiated another elbow in
+the twisting street--and there all about us was the aftermath and
+wreckage of a spirited fight.
+
+Earlier in this chapter I told--or tried to tell--how La Buissiere must
+have looked in peaceful times.  I shall try now to tell how it actually
+looked that afternoon we rode into it.
+
+In the center of the town the main street opens out to form an irregular
+circle, and the houses fronting it make a compact ring.  Through a gap
+one gets a glimpse of the little river which one has just crossed; and
+on the river bank stands the mill, or what is left of it, and that is
+little enough.  Its roof is gone, shot clear away in a shower of
+shattered tiling, and its walls are breached in a hundred places.  It is
+pretty certain that mill will never grind grist again.
+
+On its upper floor, which is now a sieve, the Germans--so they
+themselves told us--found, after the fighting, the seventy-year-old
+miller, dead, with a gun in his hands and a hole in his head.  He had
+elected to help the French defend the place; and it was as well for him
+that he fell fighting, because, had he been taken alive, the Prussians,
+following their grim rule for all civilians caught with weapons, would
+have stood him up against a wall with a firing squad before him.
+
+The houses round about have fared better, in the main, than the mill,
+though none of them has come scatheless out of the fight.  Hardly a
+windowpane is whole; hardly a wall but is pocked by bullets or rent by
+larger missiles.  Some houses have lost roofs; some have lost side
+walls, so that one can gaze straight into them and see the cluttered
+furnishings, half buried in shattered masonry and crumbled plaster.
+
+One small cottage has been blown clear away in a blast of artillery
+fire; only the chimney remains, pointing upward like a stubby finger.  A
+fireplace, with a fire in it, is the glowing heart of a house; and a
+chimney completes it and reveals that it is a home fit for human
+creatures to live in; but we see here--and the truth of it strikes us as
+it never did before--that a chimney standing alone typifies desolation
+and ruin more fitly, more brutally, than any written words could typify
+it.
+
+Everywhere there are soldiers--German soldiers--in their soiled, dusty
+gray service uniforms, always in heavy boots; always with their tunics
+buttoned to the throat.  Some, off duty, are lounging at ease in the
+doors of the houses.  More, on duty, are moving about briskly in squads,
+with fixed bayonets.  One is learning to ride a bicycle, and when he
+falls off, as he does repeatedly, his comrades laugh at him and shout
+derisive advice at him.
+
+There are not many of the townsfolk in sight.  Experience has taught us
+that in any town not occupied by the enemy our appearance will be the
+signal for an immediate gathering of the citizens, all flocking about
+us, filled with a naive, respectful inquisitiveness, and wanting to know
+where we have come from and to what place we are going.  Here in this
+stricken town not a single villager comes near us.  A priest passes us,
+bows deeply to us, and in an instant is gone round a jog in the street,
+the skirts of his black robe flicking behind him.  From upper windows
+faces peer out at us--faces of women and children mostly.  In nearly
+every one of these faces a sort of cow-like bewilderment expresses
+itself--not grief, not even resentment, but merely a stupefied
+wonderment at the astounding fact that their town, rather than some
+other town, should be the town where the soldiers of other nations come
+to fight out their feud.  We have come to know well that look these last
+few days.  So far as we have seen there has been no mistreatment of
+civilians by the soldiers; yet we note that the villagers stay inside
+the shelter of their damaged homes as though they felt safer there.  A
+young officer bustles up, spick and span in his tan boots and tan
+gloves, and, finding us to be Americans and correspondents, becomes
+instantly effusive.  He has just come through his first fight, seemingly
+with some credit to himself; and he is proud of the part he has played
+and is pleased to talk about it.  Of his own accord he volunteers to
+lead us to the heights back of the town where the French defenses were
+and where the hand-to-hand fighting took place.
+
+As we trail along behind him in single file we pass a small paved court
+before a stable and see a squad of French prisoners.  Later we are to
+see several thousand French prisoners; but now the sight is at once a
+sensation and a novelty to us.  These are all French prisoners; there
+are no Belgians or Englishmen among them.  In their long, cumbersome
+blue coats and baggy red pants they are huddled down against a wall in a
+heap of straw.  They lie there silently, chewing straws and looking very
+forlorn.  Four German soldiers with fixed bayonets are guarding them.
+
+The young lieutenant leads us along a steeply ascending road over a
+ridge and then stops; and as we look about us the consciousness strikes
+home to us, with almost the jar of a physical blow, that we are standing
+where men have lately striven together and have fallen and died.
+
+In front of us and below us is the town, with the river winding into it
+at the east and out of it at the west; and beyond the town, to the
+north, is the cup-shaped valley of fair, fat farm lands, all heavy and
+pregnant with un-garnered, ungathered crops.  Behind us, on the front of
+the hill, is a hedge, and beyond the hedge--just a foot or so back of
+it, in fact--is a deep trench, plainly dug out by hand, and so lately
+done that the cut clods are still moist and fresh-looking.  At the first
+instant of looking it seems to us that this intrenchment is full of dead
+men; but when we look closer we see that what we take for corpses are
+the scattered garments and equipments of French infantrymen--long blue
+coats; peaked, red-topped caps; spare shirts; rifled knapsacks; water-
+bottles; broken guns; side arms; bayonet belts and blanket rolls.  There
+are perhaps twenty guns in sight.  Each one has been rendered useless by
+being struck against the earth with sufficient force to snap the stock
+at the grip.
+
+Almost at my feet is a knapsack, ripped open and revealing a card of
+small china buttons, a new red handkerchief, a gray-striped flannel
+shirt, a pencil and a sheaf of writing paper.  Rummaging in the main
+compartment I find, folded at the back, a book recording the name and
+record of military service of one Gaston Michel Miseroux, whose home is
+at Amiens, and who is--or was--a private in the Tenth Battalion of the
+---- Regiment of Chasseurs a Pied.  Whether this Gaston Michel Miseroux
+got away alive without his knapsack, or whether he was captured or was
+killed, there is none to say.  His service record is here in the
+trampled dust and he is gone.
+
+Before going farther the young lieutenant, speaking in his broken
+English, told us the story of the fight, which had been fought, he said,
+just forty-eight hours before.  "The French," he said, "must have been
+here for several days.  They had fortified this hill, as you see;
+digging intrenchments in front for their riflemen and putting their
+artillery behind at a place I shall presently show you.  Also they had
+placed many of their sharpshooters in the houses.  It was a strong
+position, commanding the passage of the river, and they should have been
+able to hold it against twice their number.
+
+"Our men came, as you did, along that road off yonder; and then our
+infantry advanced across the fields under cover of our artillery fire.
+We were in the open and the French were above us here and behind
+shelter; and so we lost many men.
+
+"They had mined the bridge over the canal and also the last remaining
+bridge across the river; but we came so fast that we took both bridges
+before they could set off the mines.
+
+"In twenty minutes we held the town and the last of their sharpshooters
+in the houses had been dislodged or killed.  Then, while our guns moved
+over there to the left and shelled them on the flank, two companies of
+Germans--five hundred men--charged up the steep road over which you have
+just climbed and took this trench here in five minutes of close
+fighting.
+
+"The enemy lost many men here before they ran.  So did we lose many.  On
+that spot there"--he pointed to a little gap in the hedge, not twenty
+feet away, where the grass was pressed flat--"I saw three dead men lying
+in a heap.
+
+"We pushed the French back, taking a few prisoners as we went, until on
+the other side of this hill our artillery began to rake them, and then
+they gave way altogether and retreated to the south, taking their guns.
+Remember, they outnumbered us and they had the advantage of position;
+but we whipped them--we Germans--as we always do whip our enemies."
+
+His voice changed from boasting to pity:
+
+"Ach, but it was shameful that they should have been sent against us
+wearing those long blue coats, those red trousers, those shiny black
+belts and bright brass buttons! At a mile, or even half a mile, the
+Germans in their dark-gray uniforms, with dull facings, fade into the
+background; but a Frenchman in his foolish monkey clothes is a target
+for as far as you can see him.
+
+"And their equipment--see how flimsy it is when compared with ours! And
+their guns--so inferior, so old-fashioned alongside the German guns! I
+tell you this: Forty-four years they have been wishing to fight us for
+what we did in 1870; and when the time comes they are not ready and we
+are ready.  While they have been singing their Marseillaise Hymn, we
+have been thinking.  While they have been talking, we have been
+working."
+
+Next he escorted us back along the small plateau that extended south
+from the face of the bluff.  We made our way through a constantly
+growing confusion of abandoned equipment and garments--all the flotsam
+and jetsam of a rout.  I suppose we saw as many as fifty smashed French
+rifles, as many as a hundred and fifty canteens and knapsacks.
+
+Crossing a sunken road, where trenches for riflemen to kneel in and fire
+from had been dug in the sides of the bank--a road our guide said was
+full of dead men after the fight--we came very soon to the site of the
+French camp.  Here, from the medley and mixture of an indescribable
+jumble of wreckage, certain objects stand out, as I write this, detached
+and plain in my mind; such things, for example, as a straw basket of
+twelve champagne bottles with two bottles full and ten empty; a box of
+lump sugar, broken open, with a stain of spilled red wine on some of the
+white cubes; a roll of new mattresses jammed into a natural receptacle
+at the root of an oak tree; a saber hilt of shining brass with the blade
+missing; a whole set of pewter knives and forks sown broadcast on the
+bruised and trampled grass.  But there was no German relic in the lot
+--you may be sure of that.  Farther down, where the sunken road again
+wound across our path, we passed an old-fashioned family carriage jammed
+against the bank, with one shaft snapped off short.  Lying on the dusty
+seat-cushion was a single silver teaspoon.
+
+Almost opposite the carriage, against the other bank, was a cavalryman's
+boot; it had been cut from a wounded limb.  The leather had been split
+all the way down the leg from the top to the ankle, and the inside of
+the boot was full of clotted, dried blood.  And just as we turned back
+to return to the town I saw a child's stuffed cloth doll--rag dolls I
+think they call them in the States--lying flat in the road; and a wagon
+wheel or a camion wheel had passed over the head, squashing it flat.
+
+I am not striving for effect when I tell of this trifle.  When you write
+of such things as a battlefield you do not need to strive for effect.
+The effects are all there, ready-made, waiting to be set down.  Nor do I
+know how a child's doll came to be in that harried, uptorn place.  I
+only know it was there, and being there it seemed to me to sum up the
+fate of little Belgium in this great war.  If I had been seeking a
+visible symbol of Belgium's case I do not believe I could have found a
+more fitting one anywhere.
+
+Going down the hill to the town we met, skirting across our path, a
+party of natives wearing Red Cross distinguishments.  The lieutenant
+said these men had undoubtedly been beating the woods and grain fields
+for the scattered wounded or dead.  He added, without emotion, that from
+time to time they found one such; in fact, the volunteer searchers had
+brought in two Frenchmen just before we arrived--one to be cared for at
+the hospital, the other to be buried.
+
+We had thanked the young lieutenant and had bade him good-by, and were
+starting off again, hoping to make Maubeuge before night, when suddenly
+it struck me that the one thing about La Buissiere I should recall most
+vividly was not the sight of it, all stricken and stunned and forlorn as
+it was, but the stench of it.
+
+Before this my eyes had been so busy recording impressions that my nose
+had neglected its duty; now for the first time I sensed the vile reek
+that arose from all about me.  The place was one big, horrid stink.  It
+smelled of ether and iodoform and carbolic acid--there being any number
+of improvised hospitals, full of wounded, in sight; it smelled of sour
+beef bones and stale bread and moldy hay and fresh horse dung; it
+smelled of the sweaty bodies of the soldiers; it smelled of everything
+that is fetid and rancid and unsavory and unwholesome.
+
+And yet, forty-eight hours before, this town, if it was like every other
+Belgian town, must have been as clean as clean could be.  When the
+Belgian peasant housewife has cleaned the inside of her house she issues
+forth with bucket and scrubbing brush and washes the outside of it--and
+even the pavement in front and the cobbles of the road. But the war had
+come to La Buissiere and turned it upside down.
+
+A war wastes towns, it seems, even more visibly than it wastes nations.
+Already the streets were ankle-deep in filth.  There were broken lamps
+and broken bottles and broken windowpanes everywhere, and one could not
+step without an accompaniment of crunching glass from underfoot.
+
+Sacks of provender, which the French had abandoned, were split open and
+their contents wasted in the mire while the inhabitants went hungry.
+The lower floors of the houses were bedded in straw where the soldiers
+had slept, and the straw was thickly covered with dried mud and already
+gave off a sour-sickish odor.  Over everything was the lime dust from
+the powdered walls and plastering.
+
+We drove away, then, over the hill toward the south.  From the crest of
+the bluff we could look down on ruined La Buissiere, with its garrison
+of victorious invaders, its frightened townspeople, and its houses full
+of maimed and crippled soldiers of both sides.
+
+Beyond we could see the fields, where the crops, already overripe, must
+surely waste for lack of men and teams to harvest them; and on the edge
+of one field we marked where the three peasants dug the grave for the
+rotting horse, striving to get it underground before it set up a plague.
+
+Except for them, busy with pick and spade, no living creature in sight
+was at work.
+
+Sherman said it!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 4
+
+"Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter!"
+
+
+Have you ever seen three hundred thousand men and one hundred thousand
+horses moving in one compact, marvelous unit of organization, discipline
+and system? If you have not seen it you cannot imagine what it is like.
+If you have seen it you cannot tell what it is like.  In one case the
+conceptive faculty fails you; in the other the descriptive.  I, who have
+seen this sight, am not foolish enough to undertake to put it down with
+pencil on paper.  I think I know something of the limitations of the
+written English language. What I do mean to try to do in this chapter is
+to record some of my impressions as I watched it.
+
+In beginning this job I find myself casting about for comparisons to set
+up against the vision of a full German army of seven army corps on the
+march.  I think of the tales I have read and the stories I have heard of
+other great armies: Alaric's war bands and Attila's; the First Crusade;
+Hannibal's cohorts, and Alexander's host, and Caesar's legions; the
+Goths and the Vandals; the million of Xerxes--if it was a million--and
+Napoleon starting for Moscow.
+
+It is of no use.  This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across
+Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made,
+man-managed thing.  It seems more like a great, orderly function of
+Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a
+mighty wind.  It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of
+thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly is it welded into a whole.  It
+is harder still to accept it as a mutable and a mortal organism, subject
+to the shifts of chance and mischance.
+
+And then, on top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of
+three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one
+single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war
+strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater
+army and hardly know it was there--why, then, the brain refuses to
+wrestle with a computation so gigantic.  The imagination just naturally
+bogs down and quits.
+
+I have already set forth in some detail how it came to pass that we went
+forth from Brussels in a taxicab looking for the war; and how in the
+outskirts of Louvain we found it, and very shortly thereafter also found
+that we were cut off from our return and incidentally had lost not only
+our chauffeur and our taxi-cab but our overcoats as well. There being
+nothing else to do we made ourselves comfortable along side the Belgian
+Lion Cafe in the southern edge of Louvain, and for hours we watched the
+advance guard sliding down the road through a fog of white dust.
+
+Each time a break came in the weaving gray lines we fancied this surely
+was all.  All? What we saw there was a puny dribbling stream compared
+with the torrent that was coming.  The crest of that living tidal wave
+was still two days and many miles to the rearward.  We had seen the head
+and a little of the neck.  The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray
+centipede was as yet far behind.
+
+As we sat in chairs tilted against the wall and watched, we witnessed an
+interesting little side play.  At the first coming of the German
+skirmishers the people of this quarter of the town had seemed stupefied
+with amazement and astonishment.  Most of them, it subsequently
+developed, had believed right up to the last minute that the forts of
+Liege still held out and that the Germans had not yet passed the
+gateways of their country, many kilometers to the eastward.  When the
+scouts of the enemy appeared in their streets they fell for the moment
+into a stunned state.  A little later the appearance of a troop of
+Uhlans had revived their resentment.  We had heard that quick hiss and
+snarl of hatred which sprang from them as the lancers trotted into view
+on their superb mounts out of the mouth of a neighboring lane, and had
+seen how instantaneously the dull, malignant gleam of gun metal, as a
+sergeant pulled his pistol on them, had brought the silence of
+frightened respect again.
+
+It now appeared that realization of the number of the invaders was
+breeding in the Belgians a placating spirit.  If a soldier fell out of
+line at the door of a house to ask for water, all within that house
+strove to bring the water to him.  If an officer, returning from a small
+sortie into other streets, checked up to ask the way to rejoin his
+command, a dozen eager arms waved in chorus to point out the proper
+direction, and a babble of solicitous voices arose from the group about
+his halted horse.
+
+Young Belgian girls began smiling at soldiers swinging by and the
+soldiers grinned back and waved their arms.  You might almost have
+thought the troops were Allies passing through a friendly community.
+This phase of the plastic Flemish temperament made us marvel.  When I
+was told, a fortnight afterward, how these same people rose in the night
+to strike at these their enemies, and how, so doing, they brought about
+the ruination of their city and the summary executions of some hundreds
+of themselves, I marveled all the more.
+
+Presently, as we sat there, we heard--above the rumbling of cannon
+wheels, the nimble clunking of hurrying hoofs and the heavy thudding of
+booted feet, falling and rising all in unison--a new note from overhead,
+a combination of whir and flutter and whine.  We looked aloft.  Directly
+above the troops, flying as straight for Brussels as a homing bee for
+the hive, went a military monoplane, serving as courier and spy for the
+crawling columns below it.  Directly, having gone far ahead, it came
+speeding back, along a lower air lane and performed a series of circling
+and darting gyrations, which doubtlessly had a signal-code meaning for
+the troops.  Twice or three times it swung directly above our heads, and
+at the height at which it now evoluted we could plainly distinguish the
+downward curve of its wing-planes and the peculiar droop of the rudder
+--both things that marked it for an army model.  We could also make out
+the black cross painted on its belly as a further distinguishing mark.
+
+To me a monoplane always suggests a bird when it does not suggest an
+insect or a winged reptile; and this monoplane particularly suggested
+the bird type.  The simile which occurred to me was that of the bird
+which guards the African rhinoceros; after that it was doubly easy to
+conceive of this army as a rhinoceros, having all the brute strength and
+brute force which are a part of that creature, and its well-armored
+sides and massive legs and deadly horned head; and finally its peculiar
+fancy for charging straight at its objective target, trampling down all
+obstacles in the way.
+
+The Germans also fancy their monoplane as a bird; but they call it
+Taube--a dove.  To think of calling this sinister adjunct of warfare a
+dove, which among modern peoples has always symbolized peace, seemed a
+most terrible bit of sarcasm.  As an exquisite essence of irony I saw
+but one thing during our week-end in Louvain to match it, and that was a
+big van requisitioned from a Cologne florist's shop to use in a baggage
+train. It bore on its sides advertisements of potted plants and floral
+pieces--and it was loaded to its top with spare ammunition.
+
+Yet, on second thought, I do not believe the Prussians call their war
+monoplane a dove by way of satire.  The Prussians are a serious-minded
+race and never more serious than when they make war, as all the world
+now knows.
+
+Three monoplanes buzzed over us, making sawmill sounds, during the next
+hour or two. Thereafter, whenever we saw German troops on the march
+through a country new to them we looked aloft for the thing with the
+droopy wings and the black cross on its yellow abdomen.  Sooner or later
+it appeared, coming always out of nowhere and vanishing always into
+space.  We were never disappointed.  It is only the man who expects the
+German army to forget something needful or necessary who is
+disappointed.
+
+It was late in the afternoon when we bade farewell to the three-hundred-
+pound proprietress of the Belgian Lion and sought to reach the center of
+the town through byways not yet blocked off by the marching regiments.
+When we were perhaps halfway to our destination we met a town bellman
+and a town crier, the latter being in the uniform of a Garde Civique.
+The bellringer would ply his clapper until he drew a crowd, and then the
+Garde Civique would halt in an open space at the junction of two or more
+streets and read a proclamation from the burgomaster calling on all the
+inhabitants to preserve their tranquillity and refrain from overt acts
+against the Germans, under promise of safety if they obeyed and threat
+of death at the hands of the Germans if they disregarded the warning.
+
+This word-of-mouth method of spreading an order applied only to the
+outlying sections. In the more thickly settled districts, where
+presumably the populace could read and write, proclamations posted on
+wall and window took its place.  During the three days we stayed in
+Louvain one proclamation succeeded another with almost the frequency of
+special extras of evening newspapers when a big news story breaks in an
+American city: The citizens were to surrender all firearms in their
+possession; it would be immediately fatal to him if a man were caught
+with a lethal weapon on his person or in his house. Tradespeople might
+charge this or that price for the necessities of life, and no more.  All
+persons, except physicians and nurses in the discharge of their
+professional duties, and gendarmes--the latter being now disarmed and
+entirely subservient to the military authorities--must be off the
+streets and public squares at a given time--to wit, nine p. m.  Cafes
+must close at the same hour.  Any soldier who refused to pay for any
+private purchase should be immediately reported at headquarters for
+punishment.  Upper front windows of all houses on certain specified
+streets must be closed and locked after nightfall, remaining so until
+daylight of the following morning; this notice being followed and
+overlapped very shortly by one more amplifying, which prescribed that
+not only must front windows be made fast, but all must have lights
+behind them and the street doors must be left unlocked.
+
+The portent of this was simple enough: If any man sought to fire on the
+soldiers below he must first unfasten a window and expose himself in the
+light; and after he fired admittance would be made easy for those who
+came searching for him to kill him.
+
+At first these placards were signed by the burgomaster, with the
+military commandant's indorsement, and sometimes by both those
+functionaries; but on the second day there appeared one signed by the
+commandant only; and this one, for special emphasis, was bounded by wide
+borders printed in bright red.  It stated, with cruel brevity, that the
+burgomaster, the senator for the district and the leading magistrate had
+been taken into custody as hostages for the good conduct of their
+constituents; and that if a civilian made any attack against the Germans
+he would forfeit his own life and endanger the lives of the three
+prisoners.  Thus, inch by inch, the conquerors, sensing a growing spirit
+of revolt among the conquered--a spirit as yet nowise visible on the
+surface--took typically German steps to hold the rebellious people of
+Louvain in hobbles.  It was when we reached the Y-shaped square in the
+middle of things, with the splendid old Gothic town hall rising on one
+side of it and the famous Church of Saint Pierre at the bottom of the
+gore, that we first beheld at close hand the army of the War Lord.
+Alongside the Belgian Lion we had thought it best to keep our distance
+from the troops as they passed obliquely across our line of vision.
+Here we might press as closely as we pleased to the column.  The
+magnificent precision with which the whole machinery moved was
+astounding--I started to say appalling.  Three streets converging into
+the place were glutted with men, extending from curb to curb; and for an
+outlet there was but one somewhat wider street, which twisted its course
+under the gray walls of the church.  Yet somehow the various lines
+melted together and went thumping off out of sight like streams running
+down a funnel and out at the spout.
+
+Never, so far as we could tell, was there any congestion, any hitch, any
+suggestion of confusion.  Frequently there would come from a sideway a
+group of officers on horseback, or a whole string of commandeered
+touring cars bearing monocled, haughty staff officers in the tonneaus,
+with guards riding beside the chauffeurs and small slick trunks strapped
+on behind.  A whistle would sound shrilly then; and magically a gap
+would appear in the formation.  Into this gap the horsemen or the
+imperious automobiles would slip, and away the column would go again
+without having been disturbed or impeded noticeably.  No stage manager
+ever handled his supers better; and here, be it remembered, there were
+uncountable thousands of supers, and for a stage the twisting, medieval
+convolutions of a strange city.  Now for a space of minutes it would be
+infantry that passed, at the swinging lunge of German foot soldiers on a
+forced march.  Now it would be cavalry, with accouterments jingling and
+horses scrouging in the close-packed ranks; else a battery of the
+viperish looking little rapid-fire guns, or a battery of heavier cannon,
+with cloth fittings over their ugly snouts, like muzzled dogs whose bark
+is bad and whose bite is worse.
+
+Then, always in due order, would succeed the field telegraph corps; the
+field post-office corps; the Red Cross corps; the brass band of, say,
+forty pieces; and all the rest of it, to the extent of a thousand and
+one circus parades rolled together.  There were boats for making pontoon
+bridges, mounted side by side on wagons, with the dried mud of the River
+Meuse still on their flat bottoms; there were baggage trains miles in
+length, wherein the supply of regular army wagons was eked out with
+nondescript vehicles--even family carriages and delivery vans gathered
+up hastily, as the signs on their sides betrayed, from the tradespeople
+of a dozen Northern German cities and towns, and now bearing chalk marks
+on them to show in what division they belonged.  And inevitably at the
+tail of each regiment came its cook wagons, with fires kindled and food
+cooking for supper in the big portable ranges, so that when these passed
+the air would be charged with that pungent reek of burning wood which
+makes an American think of a fire engine on its way to answer an alarm.
+
+Once, as a cook perched on a step at the back of his wagon bent forward
+to stir the stew with a spoon almost big enough for a spade, I saw under
+his hiked-up coat-tails that at the back of his gray trousers there were
+four suspender buttons in a row instead of two. The purpose of this was
+plain: when his suspenders chafed him he might, by shifting the straps
+to different buttons, shift the strain on his shoulders.  All German
+soldiers' trousers have this extra garnishment of buttons aft.
+
+Somebody thought of that.  Somebody thought of everything.
+
+We in America are accustomed to think of the Germans as an obese race,
+swinging big paunches in front of them; but in that army the only fat
+men we saw were officers, and not so many of them.  On occasion, some
+colonel, beefy as a brisket and with rolls of fat on the back of his
+close-shaved neck, would be seen bouncing by, balancing his tired
+stomach on his saddle pommel; but, without exception, the men in the
+ranks were trained down and fine drawn.  They bent forward under the
+weight of their knapsacks and blanket rolls; and their middles were
+bulky with cartridge belts, and bulging pockets covered their flanks.
+
+Inside the shapeless uniforms, however, their limbs swung with athletic
+freedom, and even at the fag-end of a hard day's marching, with perhaps
+several hours of marching yet ahead of them, they carried their heavy
+guns as though those guns were toys.  Their fair sunburned faces were
+lined with sweat marks and masked under dust, and doubtless some were
+desperately weary; but I did not see a straggler.  To date I presume I
+have seen upward of a million of these German soldiers on the march, and
+I have yet to see a straggler.
+
+For the most part the rank and file were stamped by their faces and
+their limbs as being of peasant blood or of the petty artisan type; but
+here and there, along with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick
+maker, passed one of a slenderer build, usually spectacled and wearing,
+even in this employment, the unmistakable look of the cultured,
+scholarly man.
+
+And every other man, regardless of his breed, held a cheap cigar between
+his front teeth; but the wagon drivers and many of the cavalrymen smoked
+pipes--the long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe, which the German loves.  The
+column moved beneath a smoke-wreath of its own making.
+
+The thing, however, which struck one most forcibly was the absolute
+completeness, the perfect uniformity, of the whole scheme.  Any man's
+equipment was identically like any other man's equipment.  Every
+drinking cup dangled behind its owner's spine-tip at precisely the same
+angle; every strap and every buckle matched.  These Germans had been run
+through a mold and they had all come out soldiers.  And, barring a few
+general officers, they were all young men--men yet on the sunny side of
+thirty.  Later we were to see plenty of older men--reserves and
+Landwehr--but this was the pick of the western line that passed through
+Louvain, the chosen product of the active wing of the service.
+
+Out of the narrow streets the marchers issued; and as they reached the
+broader space before the town hall each company would raise a song,
+beating with its heavy boots on the paving stones to mark the time.
+Presently we detected a mutter of resentment rising from the troops; and
+seeking the cause of this we discerned that some of them had caught
+sight of a big Belgian flag which whipped in the breeze from the top of
+the Church of Saint Pierre.  However, the flag stayed where it had been
+put during the three days we remained in Louvain.  Seemingly the German
+commander did not greatly care whose flag flew on the church tower
+overhead so long as he held dominion of the earth below and the dwellers
+thereof.
+
+Well, we watched the gray ear-wig wriggling away to the westward until
+we were surfeited, and then we set about finding a place where we might
+rest our dizzy heads. We could not get near the principal hotels.  These
+already were filled with high officers and ringed about with sentries;
+but half a mile away, on the plaza fronting the main railroad station,
+we finally secured accommodations--such as they were--at a small fourth-
+rate hotel.
+
+It called itself by a gorgeous title--it was the House of the Thousand
+Columns, which was as true a saying as though it had been named the
+House of the One Column; for it had neither one column nor a thousand,
+but only a small, dingy beer bar below and some ten dismal living rooms
+above.  Established here, we set about getting in touch with the German
+higher-ups, since we were likely to be mistaken for Englishmen, which
+would be embarrassing certainly, and might even be painful.  At the
+hotel next door--for all the buildings flanking this square were hotels
+of a sort--we found a group of officers.
+
+One of them, a tall, handsome, magnetic chap, with a big, deep laugh and
+a most beautiful command of our own tongue, turned out to be a captain
+on the general staff.  It seemed to him the greatest joke in the world
+that four American correspondents should come looking for war in a
+taxicab, and should find it too.  He beat himself on his flanks in the
+excess of his joy, and called up half a dozen friends to hear the
+amazing tale; and they enjoyed it too.
+
+He said he felt sure his adjutant would appreciate the joke; and, as
+incidentally his adjutant was the person in all the world we wanted most
+just then to see, we went with him to headquarters, which was a mile
+away in the local Palais de Justice--or, as we should say in America,
+the courthouse.  By now it was good and dark; and as no street lamps
+burned we walked through a street that was like a tunnel for blackness.
+
+The roadway was full of infantry still pressing forward to a camping
+place somewhere beyond the town.  We could just make out the shadowy
+shapes of the men, but their feet made a noise like thunderclaps, and
+they sang a German marching song with a splendid lilt and swing to it.
+
+"Just listen!" said the captain proudly.  "They are always like that--
+they march all day and half the night, and never do they grow weary.
+They are in fine spirits--our men. And we can hardly hold them back.
+They will go forward--always forward!
+
+"In this war we have no such command as Retreat! That word we have
+blotted out. Either we shall go forward or we shall die! We do not
+expect to fall back, ever.  The men know this; and if our generals would
+but let them they would run to Paris instead of walking there."
+
+I think it was not altogether through vainglory he spoke.  He was not a
+bombastic sort.  I think he voiced the intent of the army to which he
+belonged.
+
+At the Palais de Justice the adjutant was not to be seen; so our guide
+volunteered to write a note of introduction for us.  Standing in a
+doorway of the building, where a light burned, he opened a small flat
+leather pack that swung from his belt, along with the excellent map of
+Belgium inclosed in a leather frame which every German officer carried.
+We marveled that the pack contained pencils, pens, inkpot, seals,
+officially stamped envelopes and note paper, and blank forms of various
+devices.  Verily these Germans had remembered all things and forgotten
+nothing.  I said that to myself mentally at the moment; nor have I had
+reason since to withdraw or qualify the remark.
+
+The next morning I saw the adjutant, whose name was Renner and whose
+title was that of major; but first I, as spokesman, underwent a search
+for hidden weapons at the hands of a secret service man.  Major Renner
+was most courteous; also he was amused to hear the details of our
+taxicabbing expedition into his lines.  But of the desire which lay
+nearest our hearts---to get back to Brussels in time haply to witness
+its occupation by the Germans--he would not hear.
+
+"For your own sakes," thus he explained it, "I dare not let you
+gentlemen go.  Terrible things have happened.  Last night a colonel of
+infantry was murdered while he was asleep; and I have just heard that
+fifteen of our soldiers had their throats cut, also as they slept.  From
+houses our troops have been fired on, and between here and Brussels
+there has been much of this guerrilla warfare on us.  To those who do
+such things and to those who protect them we show no mercy.  We shoot
+them on the spot and burn their houses to the ground.
+
+"I can well understand that the Belgians resent our coming into their
+country.  We ourselves regret it; but it was a military necessity.  We
+could do nothing else.  If the Belgians put on uniforms and enroll as
+soldiers and fight us openly, we shall capture them if we can; we shall
+kill them if we must; but in all cases we shall treat them as honorable
+enemies, fighting under the rules of civilized warfare.
+
+"But this shooting from ambush by civilians; this murdering of our
+people in the night--that we cannot endure.  We have made a rule that if
+shots are fired by a civilian from a house then we shall burn that
+house; and we shall kill that man and all the other men in that house
+whom we suspect of harboring him or aiding him.
+
+"We make no attempt to disguise our methods of reprisal.  We are willing
+for the world to know it; and it is not because I wish to cover up or
+hide any of our actions from your eyes, and from the eyes of the
+American people, that I am refusing you passes for your return to
+Brussels to-day.  But, you see, our men have been terribly excited by
+these crimes of the Belgian populace, and in their excitement they might
+make serious mistakes.
+
+"Our troops are under splendid discipline, as you may have seen already
+for yourselves. And I assure you the Germans are not a bloodthirsty or a
+drunken or a barbarous people; but in every army there are fools and,
+what is worse, in every army there are brutes.  You are strangers; and
+if you passed along the road to-day some of our more ignorant men,
+seeing that you were not natives and suspecting your motives, might harm
+you.  There might be some stupid, angry common soldier, some over-
+zealous under officer--you understand me, do you not, gentlemen?
+
+"So you will please remain here quietly, having nothing to do with any
+of our men who may seek to talk with you.  That last is important; for I
+may tell you that our secret-service people have already reported your
+presence, and they naturally are anxious to make a showing.
+
+"At the end of one day--perhaps two--we shall be able, I think, to give
+you safe conduct back to Brussels.  And then I hope you will be able to
+speak a good word to the American public for our army."
+
+After this fashion of speaking I heard now from the lips of Major Renner
+what I subsequently heard fifty times from other army men, and likewise
+from high German civilians, of the common German attitude toward
+Belgium.  Often these others have used almost the same words he used.
+Invariably they have sought to convey the same meaning.
+
+For those three days we stayed on unwillingly in Louvain we were not
+once out of sight of German soldiers, nor by day or night out of sound
+of their threshing feet and their rumbling wheels.  We never looked;
+this way or that but we saw their gray masses blocking up the distances.
+We never entered shop or house but we found Germans already there.  We
+never sought to turn off the main-traveled streets into a byway but our
+path was barred by a guard seeking to know our business.  And always, as
+we noted, for this duty those in command had chosen soldiers who knew a
+smattering of French, in order that the sentries might be able to speak
+with the citizens.  If we passed along a sidewalk the chances were that
+it would be lined thick with soldiers lying against the walls resting,
+or sitting on the curbs, with their shoes off, easing their feet.  If we
+looked into the sky our prospects for seeing a monoplane flying about
+were most excellent.  If we entered a square it was bound to be jammed
+with horses and packed baggage trains and supply wagons.  The atmosphere
+was laden with the ropy scents of the boiling stews and with the heavier
+smells of the soldiers' unwashed bodies and their sweating horses.
+
+Finally, to their credit be it said, we personally did not see one
+German, whether officer or private, who mistreated any citizen, or was
+offensively rude to any citizen, or who refused to pay a fair reckoning
+for what he bought, or who was conspicuously drunk. The postcard venders
+of Louvain must have grown fat with wealth; for, next to bottled beer
+and butter and cheap cigars, every common soldier craved postcards above
+all other commodities.
+
+We grew tired after a while of seeing Germans; it seemed to us that
+every vista always had been choked with unshaved, blond, blocky, short-
+haired men in rawhide boots and ill-fitting gray tunics; and that every
+vista always would be.  It took a new kind of gun, or an automobile with
+a steel prow for charging through barbed-wire entanglements, or a group
+of bedraggled Belgian prisoners slouching by under convoy, to make us
+give the spectacle more than a passing glance.
+
+There was something hypnotic, something tremendously wearisome to the
+mind in those thick lines flowing sluggishly along in streams like
+molten lead; in the hedges of gun barrels all slanting at the same
+angle; in the same types of faces repeated and repeated countlessly; in
+the legs which scissored by in such faultless unison and at each clip of
+each pair of living shears cut off just so much of the road--never any
+more and never any less, but always just exactly so much.
+
+Our jaded and satiated fancies had been fed on soldiers and all the
+cumbersome pageantry of war until they refused to be quickened by what,
+half a week before, would have set every nerve tingling.  Almost the
+only thing that stands out distinct in my memory from the confused
+recollections of the last morning spent in Louvain is a huge sight-
+seeing car--of the sort known at home as a rubberneck wagon--which
+lumbered by us with Red Cross men perched like roosting gray birds on
+all its seats.  We estimated we saw two hundred thousand men in motion
+through the ancient town.  We learned afterward we had under-figured the
+total by at least a third.
+
+During these days the life of Louvain went on, so far as our alien eyes
+could judge, pretty much as it probably did in the peace times
+preceding.  At night, obeying an order, the people stayed within their
+doors; in the daylight hours they pursued their customary business, not
+greatly incommoded apparently by the presence of the conqueror.  If
+there was simmering hate in the hearts of the men and women of Louvain
+it did not betray itself in their sobered faces.  I saw a soldier,
+somewhat fuddled, seize a serving maid about the waist and kiss her; he
+received a slap in the face and fell back in bad order, while his mates
+cheered the spunky girl.  A minute later she emerged from the house to
+which she had retreated, seemingly ready to swap slaps for kisses some
+more.
+
+However, from time to time sinister suggestions did obtrude themselves
+on us.  For example, on the second morning of our enforced stay at the
+House of the Thousand Columns we watched a double file of soldiers going
+through a street toward the Palais de Justice.  Two roughly clad natives
+walked between the lines of bared bayonets.  One was an old man who
+walked proudly with his head erect.  He was like a man going to a feast.
+The other was bent almost double, and his hands were tied behind his
+back.
+
+A few minutes afterward a barred yellow van, under escort, came through
+the square fronting the railroad station and disappeared behind a mass
+of low buildings.  From that direction we presently heard shots.  Soon
+the van came back, unescorted this time; and behind it came Belgians
+with Red Cross arm badges, bearing on their shoulders two litters on
+which were still figures covered with blankets, so that only the
+stockinged feet showed.
+
+Twice thereafter this play was repeated, with slight variations, and
+each time we Americans, looking on from our front windows, drew our own
+conclusions.  Also, from the same vantage point we saw an automobile
+pass bearing a couple of German officers and a little, scared-looking
+man in a frock coat and a high hat, whose black mustache stood out like
+a charcoal mark against the very white background of his face.  This
+little man, we learned, was the burgomaster, and this day he was being
+held a prisoner and responsible for the good conduct of some fifty-odd
+thousand of his fellow citizens.  That night our host, a gross, silent
+man in carpet slippers, told us the burgomaster was ill in bed at home.
+
+"He suffers," explained our landlord in French, "from a crisis of the
+nerves." The French language is an expressive language.
+
+Then, coming a pace nearer, our landlord added a question in a cautious
+whisper.
+
+"Messieurs," he asked, "do you think it can be true, as my neighbors
+tell me, that the United States President has ordered the Germans to get
+out of our country?"
+
+We shook our heads, and he went silently away in his carpet slippers;
+and his broad Flemish face gave no hint of what corrosive thoughts he
+may have had in his heart.
+
+It was Wednesday morning when we entered Louvain.  It was Saturday
+morning when we left it.  This last undertaking was preceded by
+difficulties.  As a preliminary to it we visited in turn all the stables
+in Louvain where ordinarily horses and wheeled vehicles could be had for
+hire.
+
+Perhaps there were no horses left in the stalls--thanks to either
+Belgian foragers or to German--or, if there were horses, no driver would
+risk his hide on the open road among the German pack trains and rear
+guards.  At length we did find a tall, red-haired Walloon who said he
+would go anywhere on earth, and provide a team for the going, if we paid
+the price he asked.  We paid it in advance, in case anything should
+happen on the way, and he took us in a venerable open carriage behind
+two crow-bait skeletons that had once, in a happier day when hay was
+cheaper, been horses.
+
+We drove slowly, taking the middle of the wide Brussels road.  On our
+right, traveling in the same direction, crawled an unending line of
+German baggage wagons and pontoon trucks.  On our left, going the
+opposite way, was another line, also unending, made up of refugee
+villagers, returning afoot to the towns beyond Louvain from which they
+had fled four days earlier.  They were footsore and they limped; they
+were of all ages and most miserable-looking.  And, one and all, they
+were as tongueless as so many ghosts.  Thus we traveled; and at the end
+of the first hour came to the tiny town of Leefdael.
+
+At Leefdael there must have been fighting, for some of the houses were
+gutted by shells.  At least two had been burned; and a big tin sign at a
+railroad crossing had become a tin colander where flying lead had sieved
+it.  In a beet patch beside one of the houses was a mound of fresh earth
+the length of a long man, with a cross of sticks at the head of it.  A
+Belgian soldier's cap was perched on the upright and a scrap of paper
+was made fast to the cross arm; and two peasants stood there apparently
+reading what was written on the paper.  Later such sights as these were
+to become almost the commonest incidents of our countryside
+campaignings; but now we looked with all our eyes.
+
+Except that the roadside ditches were littered with beer bottles and
+scraps of paper, and the road itself rutted by cannon wheels, we saw
+little enough after leaving Leefdael to suggest that an army had come
+this way until we were in the outskirts of Brussels.  In a tree-edged,
+grass-plotted boulevard at the edge of the Bois, toward Tervueren,
+cavalry had halted.  The turf was scarred with hoofprints and strewed
+with hay; and there was a row of small trenches in which the Germans had
+built their fires to do their cooking.  The sod, which had been removed
+to make these trenches, was piled in neat little terraces, ready to be
+put back; and care plainly had been taken by the troopers to avoid
+damaging the bark on the trunks of the ash and elm trees.
+
+There it was--the German system of warfare! These Germans might carry on
+their war after the most scientifically deadly plan the world has ever
+known; they might deal out their peculiarly fatal brand of drumhead
+justice to all civilians who crossed their paths bearing arms; they
+might burn and waste for punishment; they might lay on a captured city
+and a whipped province a tribute of foodstuffs and an indemnity of money
+heavier than any civilized race has ever demanded of the cowed and
+conquered--might do all these things and more besides--but their common
+troopers saved the sods of the greensward for replanting and spared the
+boles of the young shade trees! Next day we again left Brussels, the
+submissive, and made a much longer excursion under German auspices.
+And, at length, after much travail, we landed in the German frontier
+city of Aix-la-Chapelle, where I wrote these lines.  There it was, two
+days after our arrival, that we heard of the fate of Louvain and of that
+pale little man, the burgomaster, who had survived his crisis of the
+nerves to die of a German bullet.
+
+We wondered what became of the proprietor of the House of the Thousand
+Columns; and of the young Dutch tutor in the Berlitz School of
+Languages, who had served us as a guide and interpreter; and of the
+pretty, gentle little Flemish woman who brought us our meals in her
+clean, small restaurant round the corner from the Hotel de Ville; and of
+the kindly, red-bearded priest at the Church of Saint Jacques, who gave
+us ripe pears and old wine.
+
+I reckon we shall always wonder what became of them, and that we shall
+never know.  I hoped mightily that the American wing of the big Catholic
+seminary had been spared.  It had a stone figure of an American Indian--
+looking something like Sitting Bull, we thought--over its doors; and
+that was the only typically American thing we saw in all Louvain.
+
+When next I saw Louvain the University was gone and the stone Indian was
+gone too.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 5
+
+Being a Guest of the Kaiser
+
+
+You know how four of us blundered into the German lines in a taxicab;
+and how, getting out of German hands after three days and back to
+Brussels, we undertook, in less than twenty-four hours thereafter, to
+trail the main forces then shoving steadily southward with no other goal
+before them but Paris.
+
+First by hired hack, as we used to say when writing accounts of funerals
+down in Paducah, then afoot through the dust, and finally, with an
+equipment consisting of that butcher's superannuated dogcart, that
+elderly mare emeritus and those two bicycles, we made our zigzagging way
+downward through Belgium.
+
+We knew that our credentials were, for German purposes, of most dubious
+and uncertain value.  We knew that the Germans were permitting no
+correspondents--not even German correspondents--to accompany them.  We
+knew that any alien caught in the German front was liable to death on
+the spot, without investigation of his motives. We knew all these
+things; and the knowledge of them gave a fellow tingling sensations in
+the tips of his toes when he permitted himself to think about his
+situation.  But, after the first few hours, we took heart unto
+ourselves; for everywhere we met only kindness and courtesy at the hands
+of the Kaiser's soldiers, men and officers alike.
+
+There was, it is true, the single small instance of the excited noncom.
+who poked a large, unwholesome-looking automatic pistol into my
+shrinking diaphragm when he wanted me to get off the running board of a
+military automobile into which I had climbed, half a minute before, by
+invitation of the private who steered it.  I gathered his meaning right
+away, even though he uttered only guttural German and that at the top of
+his voice; a pointed revolver speaks with a tongue which is understood
+by all peoples.  Besides, he had the distinct advantage in repartee; and
+so, with no extended argument, I got down from there and he pouched his
+ironmongery.  I regarded the incident as being closed and was perfectly
+willing that it should remain closed.
+
+That, however, though of consuming interest to me at the moment, was but
+a detail--an exception to prove the standing rule.  One place we dined
+with a Rittmeister's mess; and while we sat, eating of their midday
+ration of thick pea soup with sliced sausages in it, some of the younger
+officers stood; also they let us stretch our wearied legs on their
+mattresses, which were ranged seven in a row on the parlor floor of a
+Belgian house, where from a corner a plaster statue of Joan of Arc gazed
+at us with her plaster eyes.
+
+Common soldiers offered repeatedly to share their rye-bread sandwiches
+and bottled beer with us.  Not once, but a dozen times, officers of
+various rank let us look at their maps and use their field glasses; and
+they gave us advice for reaching the zone of actual fighting and swapped
+gossip with us, and frequently regretted that they had no spare mounts
+or spare automobiles to loan us.
+
+We attributed a good deal of this to the inherent kindliness of the
+German gentleman's nature; but more of it we attributed to a newborn
+desire on the part of these men to have disinterested journalists see
+with their own eyes the scope and result of the German operations, in
+the hope that the truth regarding alleged German atrocities might reach
+the outside world and particularly might reach America.
+
+Of the waste and wreckage of war; of desolated homes and shattered
+villages; of the ruthless, relentless, punitive exactness with which the
+Germans punished not only those civilians they accused of firing on them
+but those they suspected of giving harbor or aid to the offenders; of
+widows and orphans; of families of innocent sufferers, without a roof to
+shelter them or a bite to stay them; of fair lands plowed by cannon
+balls, and harrowed with rifle bullets, and sown with dead men's bones;
+of men horribly maimed and mangled by lead and steel; of long mud
+trenches where the killed lay thick under the fresh clods--of all this
+and more I saw enough to cure any man of the delusion that war is a
+beautiful, glorious, inspiring thing, and to make him know it for what
+it is--altogether hideous and unutterably awful.
+
+As for Uhlans spearing babies on their lances, and officers sabering
+their own men, and soldiers murdering and mutilating and torturing at
+will--I saw nothing.  I knew of these tales only from having read them
+in the dispatches sent from the Continent to England, and from there
+cabled to American papers.
+
+Even so, I hold no brief for the Germans; or for the reasons that
+inspired them in waging this war; or for the fashion after which they
+have waged it.  I am only trying to tell what I saw with my own eyes and
+heard with my own ears.
+
+Be all that as it may, we straggled into Beaumont--five of us--on the
+evening of the third day out from Brussels, without baggage or
+equipment, barring only what we wore on our several tired and drooping
+backs.  As in the case of our other trip, a simple sight-seeing ride had
+resolved itself into an expeditionary campaign; and so there we were,
+bearing, as proof of our good faith and professional intentions, only
+our American passports, our passes issued by General von Jarotzky, at
+Brussels, and--most potent of all for winning confidence from the casual
+eye--a little frayed silk American flag, with a hole burned in it by a
+careless cigar butt, which was knotted to the front rail of our creaking
+dogcart.
+
+Immediately after passing the ruined and deserted village of Montignies
+St. Christophe, we came at dusk to a place where a company of German
+infantrymen were in camp about a big graystone farmhouse.  They were
+cooking supper over big trench fires and, as usual, they were singing.
+The light shone up into the faces of the cooks, bringing out in ruddy
+relief their florid skins and yellow beards.  A yearling bull calf was
+tied to a supply-wagon wheel, bellowing his indignation.  I imagine he
+quit bellowing shortly thereafter.
+
+An officer came to the edge of the road and, peering sharply at us over
+a broken hedge, made as if to stop us; then changed his mind and
+permitted us to go unchallenged. Entering the town, we proceeded,
+winding our way among pack trains and stalled motor trucks, to the town
+square.  Our little cavalcade halted to the accompaniment of good-
+natured titterings from many officers in front of the town house of the
+Prince de Caraman-Chimay.
+
+By a few Americans the prince is remembered as having been the cousin of
+one of the husbands of the much-married Clara Ward, of Detroit; but at
+this moment, though absent, he had particularly endeared himself to the
+Germans through the circumstance of his having left behind, in his wine
+cellars, twenty thousand bottles of rare vintages. Wine, I believe, is
+contraband of war.  Certainly in this instance it was.  As we speedily
+discovered, it was a very unlucky common soldier who did not have a swig
+of rare Burgundy or ancient claret to wash down his black bread and
+sausage that night at supper.
+
+Unwittingly we had bumped into the headquarters of the whole army--not
+of a single corps, but of an army.  In the thickening twilight on the
+little square gorgeous staff officers came and went, afoot, on horseback
+and in automobiles; and through an open window we caught a glimpse of a
+splendid-looking general, sitting booted and sword-belted at a table in
+the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's library, with hunting trophies--skin and
+horn and claw--looking down at him from the high-paneled oak
+wainscotings, and spick-and-span aides waiting to take his orders and
+discharge his commissions.
+
+It dawned on us that, having accidentally slipped through a hole in the
+German rear guard, we had reached a point close to the front of
+operations.  We felt uncomfortable.
+
+It was not at all likely that a Herr Over-Commander would expedite us
+with the graciousness that had marked his underlings back along the line
+of communication.  We remarked as much to one another; and it was a true
+prophecy.  A staff officer--a colonel who spoke good English--received
+us at the door of the villa and examined our papers in the light which
+streamed over his shoulder from a fine big hallway behind him. In
+everything, both then and thereafter, he was most polite.
+
+"I do not understand how you came here, you gentlemen," he said at
+length.  "We have no correspondents with our army."
+
+"You have now," said one of us, seeking to brighten the growing
+embarrassment of the situation with a small jape.
+
+Perhaps he did not understand.  Perhaps it was against the regulations
+for a colonel, in full caparison of sword and shoulder straps, to laugh
+at a joke from a dusty, wayworn, shabby stranger in a dented straw hat
+and a wrinkled Yankee-made coat.  At any rate this colonel did not
+laugh.
+
+"You did quite right to report yourselves here and explain your
+purposes," he continued gravely; "but it is impossible that you may
+proceed.  To-morrow morning we shall give you escort and transportation
+back to Brussels.  I anticipate"--here he glanced quizzically at our
+aged mare, drooping knee-sprung between the shafts of the lopsided
+dogcart--"I anticipate that you will return more speedily than you
+arrived.
+
+"You will kindly report to me here in the morning at eleven.  Meantime
+remember, gentlemen, that you are not prisoners--by no means, not.  You
+may consider yourselves for the time being as--shall we say?--guests of
+the German Army, temporarily detained.  You are at perfect liberty to
+come and go--only I should advise you not to go too far, because if you
+should try to leave town tonight our soldiers would certainly shoot you
+quite dead.  It is not agreeable to be shot; and, besides, your great
+Government might object.  So, then, I shall have the pleasure of seeing
+you in the morning, shall I not? Yes? Good night, gentlemen!"
+
+He clicked his neat heels so that his spurs jangled, and bowed us out
+into the dark.  The question of securing lodgings loomed large and
+imminent before us.  Officers filled the few small inns and hotels;
+soldiers, as we could see, were quartered thickly in all the houses in
+sight; and already the inhabitants were locking their doors and dousing
+their lights in accordance with an order from a source that was not to
+be disobeyed.  Nine out of ten houses about the square were now but
+black oblongs rising against the gray sky. We had nowhere to go; and yet
+if we did not go somewhere, and that pretty soon, the patrols would
+undoubtedly take unpleasant cognizance of our presence.  Besides, the
+searching chill of a Belgian night was making us stiff.
+
+Scouting up a narrow winding alley, one of the party who spoke German
+found a courtyard behind a schoolhouse called imposingly L'Ecole Moyenne
+de Beaumont, where he obtained permission from a German sergeant to
+stable our mare for the night in the aristocratic companionship of a
+troop of officers' horses.  Through another streak of luck we preempted
+a room in the schoolhouse and held it against all comers by right of
+squatter sovereignty.  There my friends and I slept on the stone floor,
+with a scanty amount of hay under us for a bed and our coats for
+coverlets.  But before we slept we dined.
+
+We dined on hard-boiled eggs and stale cheese--which we had saved from
+midday--in a big, bare study hall half full of lancers.  They gave us
+rye bread and some of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's wine to go with the
+provender we had brought, and they made room for us at the long benches
+that ran lengthwise of the room.  Afterward one of them--a master
+musician, for all his soiled gray uniform and grimed fingers--played a
+piano that was in the corner, while all the rest sang.
+
+It was a strange picture they made there.  On the wall, on a row of
+hooks, still hung the small umbrellas and book-satchels of the pupils.
+Presumably at the coming of the Germans they had run home in such a
+panic that they left their school-traps behind. There were sums in
+chalk, half erased, on the blackboard; and one of the troopers took a
+scrap of chalk and wrote "On to Paris!" in big letters here and there.
+A sleepy parrot, looking like a bundle of rumpled green feathers,
+squatted on its perch in a cage behind the master's desk, occasionally
+emitting a loud squawk as though protesting against this intrusion on
+its privacy.
+
+When their wine had warmed them our soldier-hosts sang and sang,
+unendingly.  They had been on the march all day, and next day would
+probably march half the day and fight the other half, for the French and
+English were just ahead; but now they sprawled over the school benches
+and drummed on the boards with their fists and feet, and sang at the
+tops of their voices.  They sang their favorite marching songs--Die
+Wacht am Rhein, of course; and Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles!
+which has a fine, sonorous cathedral swing to it; and God Save the
+King!--with different words to the air, be it said; and Haltet Aus!
+Also, for variety, they sang Tannenbaum--with the same tune as Maryland,
+My Maryland!--and Heil dir im Sieges-kranz; and snatches from various
+operas.
+
+When one of us asked for Heine's Lorelei they sang not one verse of it,
+or two, but twenty or more; and then, by way of compliment to the guests
+of the evening, they reared upon their feet and gave us The Star
+Spangled Banner, to German words. Suddenly two of them began dancing.
+In their big rawhide boots, with hobbed soles and steel-shod heels, they
+pounded back and forth, while the others whooped them on.  One of the
+dancers gave out presently; but the other seemed still unimpaired in
+wind and limb.  He darted into an adjoining room and came back in a
+minute dragging a half-frightened, half-pleased little Belgian scullery
+maid and whirled her about to waltz music until she dropped for want of
+breath to carry her another turn; after which he did a solo--Teutonic
+version--of a darky breakdown, stopping only to join in the next song.
+
+It was eleven o'clock and they were still singing when we left them and
+went groping through dark hallways to where our simple hay mattress
+awaited us.  I might add that we were indebted to a corporal of lancers
+for the hay, which he pilfered from the feed racks outside after
+somebody had stolen the two bundles of straw one of us had previously
+purchased.  Except for his charity of heart we should have lain on the
+cold flagging.
+
+The next morning was Thursday morning, and by Thursday night, at the
+very latest, we counted on being back in Brussels; but we were not
+destined to see Brussels again for nearly six weeks.  We breakfasted
+frugally on good bread and execrable coffee at a half-wrecked little
+cafe where soldiers had slept; and at eleven o'clock, when we had
+bestowed Bulotte, the ancient nag, and the dogcart on an accommodating
+youth--giving them to him as a gracious gift, since neither he nor
+anyone else would buy the outfit at any price--we repaired to the villa
+to report ourselves and start on our return to the place whence we had
+come so laboriously.
+
+The commander and his staff were just leaving, and they were in a big
+hurry.  We knew the reason for their hurry, for since daylight the sound
+of heavy firing to the south and southwest, across the border in the
+neighborhood of Maubeuge, had been plainly audible.  Officers in long
+gray overcoats with facings of blue, green, black, yellow and four
+shades of red--depending on the branches of the service to which they
+belonged--were piling into automobiles and scooting away.
+
+As we sat on a wooden bench before the prince's villa, waiting for
+further instructions from our friend of the night before--meaning by
+that the colonel who could not take a joke, but could make one of his
+own--a tall, slender young man of about twenty-four, with a little silky
+mustache and a long, vulpine nose, came striding across the square with
+long steps.  As nearly as we could tell, he wore a colonel's shoulder
+straps; and, aside from the fact that he seemed exceedingly youthful to
+be a colonel, we were astonished at the deference that was paid him by
+those of higher rank, who stood about waiting for their cars.  Generals,
+and the like, even grizzled old generals with breasts full of
+decorations, bowed and clicked before him; and when he, smiling broadly,
+insisted on shaking hands with all of them, some of the group seemed
+overcome with gratification.
+
+Presently a sort of family resemblance in his face to some one whose
+picture we had seen often somewhere began to impress itself on us, and
+we wondered who he was; but, being rather out of the setting ourselves,
+none of us cared to ask.  Two weeks later, in Aix-la-Chapelle, I was
+passing a shop and saw his likeness in full uniform on a souvenir
+postcard in the window.  It was Prince August Wilhelm, fourth son of the
+Kaiser; and we had seen him as he was about getting his first taste of
+being under fire by the enemy.
+
+Pretty soon he was gone and our colonel was gone, and nearly everybody
+else was gone too; Companies of infantry and cavalry fell in and moved
+off, and a belated battery of field artillery rumbled out of sight up
+the twisting main street.  The field postoffice staff, the field
+telegraph staff, the Red Cross corps and the wagon trains followed in
+due turn, leaving behind only a small squad to hold the town--and us.
+
+A tall young lieutenant was in charge of the handful who remained; and,
+by the same token, as was to transpire, he was also in charge of us.  He
+was built for a football player, and he had shoulders like a Cyclops,
+and his family name was Mittendorfer.  He never spoke to his men except
+to roar at them like a raging lion, and he never addressed us except to
+coo as softly as the mourning dove.  It was interesting to listen as his
+voice changed from a bellow to a croon, and back again a moment later to
+a bellow.  With training he might have made an opera singer--he had such
+a vocal range and such perfect control over it.  This Lieutenant
+Mittendorfer introduced himself to our attention by coming smartly up
+and saying there had been a delay about requisitioning an automobile for
+our use; but he thought the car would be along very shortly--and would
+the American gentlemen be so good as to wait? There being nothing else
+to do, we decided to do as he suggested.
+
+We chose for our place of waiting a row of seats before a taverne, and
+there we sat, side by side, keeping count of the guns booming in the
+distance, until it began to rain.  A sergeant came up then and invited
+us to go with him, in order that we might escape a wetting.  He waved us
+into the doorway of a house two doors from where we had been sitting, at
+the same time suggesting to us that we throw away our cigars and
+cigarettes. When we crossed the threshold we realized the good intention
+behind this advice, seeing that the room we entered, which had been a
+shop of sorts, was now an improvised powder magazine.
+
+From the floor to the height of a man it was piled with explosive shells
+for field guns, cased in straw covers like wine bottles, and stacked in
+neat rows, with their noses all pointing one way.  Our guide led us
+along an aisle of these deadly things, beckoned us through another
+doorway at the side, where a sentry stood with a bayonet fixed on his
+gun, and with a wave of his hand invited us to partake of the
+hospitalities of the place. We looked about us, and lo! we were hard-
+and-fast in jail!
+
+I have been in pleasanter indoor retreats in my time, even on rainy
+afternoons.  The room was bedded down ankle-deep in straw; and the
+straw, which had probably been fresh the day before, already gave off a
+strong musky odor--the smell of an animal cage in a zoo.
+
+For furnishings, the place contained a bench and a large iron pot
+containing a meat stew, which had now gone cold, so that a rime of gray
+suet coated the upper half of the pot.  But of human occupants there was
+an ample sufficiency, considering the cubic space available for
+breathing purposes.  Sitting in melancholy array against the walls, with
+their legs half buried in the straw and their backs against the
+baseboards, were eighteen prisoners--two Belgian cavalrymen and sixteen
+Frenchmen--mostly Zouaves and chasseurs-a-pied.  Also, there were three
+Turcos from Northern Africa, almost as dark as negroes, wearing red
+fezzes and soiled white, baggy, skirtlike arrangements instead of
+trousers.  They all looked very dirty, very unhappy and very sleepy.
+
+At the far side of the room on a bench was another group of four
+prisoners; and of these we knew two personally--Gerbeaux, a Frenchman
+who lived in Brussels and served as the resident Brussels correspondent
+of a Chicago paper; and Stevens, an American artist, originally from
+Michigan, but who for several years had divided his time between Paris
+and Brussels.  With them were a Belgian photographer, scared now into a
+quivering heap from which two wall-eyes peered out wildly, and a negro
+chauffeur, a soot-black Congo boy who had been brought away from Africa
+on a training ship as a child.  He, apparently, was the least-concerned
+person in that hole.
+
+The night before, by chance, we had heard that Gerbeaux and Stevens were
+under detention, but until this moment of meeting we did not know their
+exact whereabouts. They--the Frenchman, the American and the Belgian--
+had started out from Brussels in an auto driven by the African, on
+Monday, just a day behind us.  Because their car carried a Red Cross
+flag without authority to do so, and because they had a camera with
+them, they very soon found themselves under arrest, and, what was worse,
+under suspicion.  Except that for two days they had been marched afoot
+an average of twenty-five miles a day, they had fared pretty well,
+barring Stevens.  He, being separated from the others, had fallen into
+the hands of an officer who treated him with such severity that the
+account of his experiences makes a tale worth recounting separately and
+at length.
+
+We stayed in that place half an hour--one of the longest half hours I
+remember.  There was a soldier with a fixed bayonet at the door, and
+another soldier with a saw-edged bayonet at the window, which was
+broken.  Parties of soldiers kept coming to this window to peer at the
+exhibits within; and, as they invariably took the civilians for
+Englishmen who had been caught as spies, we attracted almost as much
+attention as the Turcos in their funny ballet skirts; in fact I may say
+we fairly divided the center of the stage with the Turcos.
+
+At the end of half an hour the lieutenant bustled in, all apologies, to
+say there had been a mistake and that we should never have been put in
+with the prisoners at all.  The rain being over, he invited us to come
+outside and get a change of air.  When we got outside we found that our
+two bicycles, which we had left leaning against the curb, were gone. To
+date they are still gone.
+
+Again we sat waiting.  Finally it occurred to us to go inside the little
+taverne, where, perhaps, we should be less conspicuous.  We went in, and
+presently we were followed by Lieutenant Mittendorfer, he bringing with
+him a tall young top-sergeant of infantry who carried his left arm in a
+sling and had a three weeks' growth of fuzzy red beard on his chops.  It
+was explained that this top-sergeant, Rosenthal by name, had been
+especially assigned to be our companion--our playfellow, as it were;--
+until such time as the long-delayed automobile should appear.
+
+Sergeant Rosenthal, who was very proud of his punctured wrist and very
+hopeful of getting a promotion, went out soon; but it speedily became
+evident that he had not forgotten us.  For one soldier with his gun
+appeared in the front room of the place, and another materialized just
+outside the door, likewise with his gun.  And by certain other
+unmistakable signs it became plain to our perceptions that as between
+being a prisoner of the German army and being a guest there was really
+no great amount of difference.  It would have taken a mathematician to
+draw the distinction, so fine it was.
+
+We stayed in that taverne and in the small living room behind it, and in
+the small high-walled courtyard behind the living room, all that
+afternoon and that evening and that night, being visited at intervals by
+either the lieutenant or the sergeant, or both of them at once.  We
+dined lightly on soldiers' bread and some of the prince's wine--
+furnished by Rosenthal--and for dessert we had some shelled almonds and
+half a cake of chocolate--furnished by ourselves; also drinks of pale
+native brandy from the bar.
+
+During the evening we received several bulletins regarding the mythical
+automobile. Invariably Mittendorfer was desolated to be compelled to
+report that there had been another slight delay.  We knew he was
+desolated, because he said he was.  During the evening, also, we met all
+the regular members of the household living under that much-disturbed
+roof.  There was the husband, a big lubberly Fleming who apparently did
+not count for much in the economic and domestic scheme of the
+establishment; his wife, a large, commanding woman who ran the business
+and the house as well; his wife's mother, an old sickly woman in her
+seventies; and his wife's sister, a poor, palsied half-wit.
+
+When the sister was a child, so we heard, she had been terribly
+frightened, so that to this day, still frightened, she crept about, a
+pale shadow, quivering all over pitiably at every sound.  She would
+stand behind a door for minutes shaking so that you could hear her
+knuckles knocking against the wall.  She seemed particularly to dread
+the sight of the German privates who came and went; and they, seeing
+this, were kind to her in a clumsy, awkward way.  Hourly, like a ghost
+she drifted in and out.
+
+For a while it looked as though we should spend the night sitting up in
+chairs; but about ten o'clock three soldiers, led by Rosenthal and
+accompanied by the landlady, went out; and when they came back they
+brought some thick feather mattresses which had been commandeered from
+neighboring houses, we judged.  Also, through the goodness of his heart,
+Mittendorfer, who impressed us more and more as a strange compound of
+severity and softness, took pity on Gerbeaux and Stevens, and bringing
+them forth from that pestilential hole next door, he convoyed them in to
+stay overnight with us.  They told us that by now the air in the
+improvised prison was absolutely suffocating, what with the closeness,
+the fouled straw, the stale food and the proximity of so many dirty
+human bodies all packed into the kennel together.
+
+Ten of us slept on the floor of that little grogshop--the five of our
+party lying spoon-fashion on two mattresses, Gerbeaux and Stevens making
+seven, and three soldiers. The soldiers relieved each other in two-hour
+spells, so that while two of them snored by the door the third sat in a
+chair in the middle of the room, with his rifle between his knees, and a
+shaded lamp and a clock on a table at his elbow.  Just before we turned
+in, Rosenthal, who had adopted a paternal tone to the three guards, each
+of whom was many years older than he, addressed them softly, saying:
+
+"Now, my children, make yourselves comfortable.  Drink what you please;
+but if any one of you gets drunk I shall take pleasure in seeing that he
+gets from seven to nine years in prison at hard labor." For which they
+thanked him gratefully in chorus.
+
+I am not addicted to the diary-keeping habit, but during the next day,
+which was Friday, I made fragmentary records of things in a journal,
+from which I now quote verbatim:
+
+Seven-thirty a.  m.--about.  After making a brief toilet by sousing our
+several faces in a pail of water, we have just breakfasted--sketchily--
+on wine and almonds.  It would seem that the German army feeds its
+prisoners, but makes no such provision for its guests.  On the whole I
+think I should prefer being a prisoner.
+
+We have offered our landlady any amount within reason for a pot of
+coffee and some toasted bread; but she protests, calling on Heaven to
+witness the truth of her words, that there is nothing to eat in the
+house--that the Germans have eaten up all her store of food, and that
+her old mother is already beginning to starve.  Yet certain appetizing
+smells, which come down the staircase from upstairs when the door is
+opened, lead me to believe she is deceiving us.  I do not blame her for
+treasuring what she has for her own flesh and blood; but I certainly
+could enjoy a couple of fried eggs.
+
+Nine a.  m.  Mittendorfer has been in, with vague remarks concerning our
+automobile. Something warns me this young man is trifling with us.  He
+appears to be a practitioner of the Japanese school of diplomacy--that
+is, he believes it is better to pile one gentle, transparent fiction on
+another until the pyramid of romance falls of its own weight, rather
+than to break the cruel news at a single blow.
+
+Eleven-twenty.  One of the soldiers has brought us half a dozen bottles
+of good wine--three bottles of red and three of white--but the larder
+remains empty.  I do not know exactly what a larder is; but if it is as
+empty as I am at the present moment it must remind itself of a haunted
+house.
+
+Eleven-forty.  A big van full of wounded Germans has arrived.  From the
+windows we can see it distinctly.  The more seriously hurt lie on the
+bed of the wagon, under the hood. The man who drives has one leg in
+splints; and of the two who sit at the tail gate, holding rifles
+upright, one has a bandaged head, and the other has an arm in a sling.
+
+Unless a German is so seriously crippled as to be entirely unfitted for
+service he manages to do something useful.  There are no loose ends and
+no waste to the German military system; I can see that.  The soldiers in
+the street cheer the wounded as they pass and the wounded answer by
+singing Die Wacht am Rhein feebly.
+
+One poor chap raises his head and looks out.  He appears to be almost
+spent, but I see his lips move as he tries to sing.  You may not care
+for the German cause, but you are bound to admire the German spirit--the
+German oneness of purpose.
+
+Noon.  As the Texas darky said: "Dinnertime fur some folks; but just
+twelve o'clock fur me!" Again I smell something cooking upstairs.  On
+the mantel of the shabby little interior sitting room, where we spend
+most of our time sitting about in a sad circle, is a little black-and-
+tan terrier pup, stuffed and mounted, with shiny glass eyes--a family
+pet, I take it, which died and was immortalized by the local
+taxidermist. If I only knew what that dog was stuffed with I would take
+a chance and eat him.
+
+I have a fellow feeling for Arctic explorers who go north and keep on
+going until they run out of things to eat.  I admire their heroism and
+sympathize with their sufferings, but I deplore their bad judgment.
+There are grapes growing on trellises in the little courtyard at the
+back, but they are too green for human consumption.  I speak
+authoritatively on this subject, having just sampled one.
+
+Two p.m.  Tried to take a nap, but failed.  Hansen found a soiled deck
+of cards behind a pile of books on the mantelpiece, and we all cheered
+up, thinking of poker; but it was a Belgian deck of thirty-two cards,
+all the pips below the seven-spot being eliminated. Poker with that deck
+would be a hazardous pursuit.
+
+McCutcheon remarks casually that he wonders what would happen if
+somebody accidentally touched off those field-gun shells in the house
+two doors away.  We suddenly remember that they are all pointed our way!
+The conversation seems to lull, and Mac, for the time being, loses
+popularity.
+
+Two-thirty p.m.  Looking out on the dreary little square of this town
+of Beaumont I note that the natives, who have been scarce enough all
+day, have now vanished almost entirely; whereas soldiers are noticeably
+more numerous than they were this morning.
+
+Three-fifteen p.m.  Heard a big noise in the street and ran to the
+window in time to see about forty English prisoners passing under guard
+--the first English soldiers I have seen, in this campaign, either as
+prisoners or otherwise.  Their tan khaki uniforms and flat caps give
+them a soldierly look very unlike the slovenly, sloppy-appearing French
+prisoners in the guardhouse; but they appear to be tremendously
+downcast. The German soldiers crowd up to stare at them, but there is no
+jeering or taunting from the Germans.  These prisoners are all
+infantrymen, judging by their uniforms.  They disappear through the
+gateway of the prince's park.
+
+Three-forty.  I have just had some exercise; walked from the front door
+to the courtyard and back.  There are two guards outside the door now
+instead of one.  The German army certainly takes mighty good care of its
+guests.
+
+This day has been as long as Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," and much more
+tiresome.  No; I'll take that back; it is not strong enough.  This day
+has been as long as the entire Christian Era.
+
+Four p.m.  Gerbeaux, who was allowed to go out foraging, under escort
+of a guard, has returned with a rope of dried onions; a can of alphabet
+noodles; half a pound of stale, crumbly macaroons; a few fresh string
+beans; a pot of strained honey, and several clean collars of assorted
+sizes.  The woman of the-house is now making soup for us out of the
+beans, the onions and the noodles.  She has also produced a little
+grated Parmesan cheese from somewhere.
+
+Four-twenty p.m.  That was the best soup I ever tasted, even if it was
+full of typographical errors from the jumbling together of the little
+alphabet noodles.  Still, nobody but a proofreader could have found
+fault with that.  There was only one trouble with that soup: there was
+not enough of it--just one bowl apiece.  I would have traded the finest
+case of vintage wine in the Chimay vaults for another bowl.
+
+Just as the woman brought in the soup Mittendorfer appeared, escorting a
+French lieutenant who was taken prisoner this morning.  The prisoner was
+a little, handsome, dapper chap not over twenty-two years old, wearing
+his trim blue-and-red uniform with an air, even though he himself looked
+thoroughly miserable.  We were warned not to speak with him, or he with
+us; but Gerbeaux, after listening to him exchanging a few words with the
+lieutenant, said he judged from his accent that the little officer was
+from the south of France.
+
+We silently offered him a bowl of the soup as he sat in a corner fenced
+off from the rest of us by a small table; but he barely tasted it, and
+after a bit he lay down in his corner, with his arm for a pillow, and
+almost instantly was asleep, breathing heavily, like a man on the verge
+of exhaustion.  A few minutes later we heard, from Sergeant Rosenthal,
+that the prisoner's brother-in-law had been killed the day before, and
+that he--the little officer--had seen the brother-in-law fall.
+
+Five p.m.  We have had good news--two chunks of good news, in fact.
+We are to dine and we are to travel.  The sergeant has acquired, from
+unknown sources, a brace of small, skinny, fresh-killed pullets; eight
+fresh eggs; a big loaf of the soggy rye bread of the field mess; and
+wine unlimited.  Also, we are told that at nine o'clock we are to start
+for Brussels--not by automobile, but aboard a train carrying wounded and
+prisoners northward.
+
+Everybody cheers up, especially after ma-dame promises to have the fowls
+and the eggs ready in less than an hour.
+
+The Belgian photographer, who, it develops, is to go with our troop, has
+been brought in from the guardhouse and placed with us.  With the
+passing hours his fright has increased.  Gerbeaux says the poor devil is
+one of the leading photographers of Brussels--that by royal appointment
+he takes pictures of the queen and her children.  But the queen would
+have trouble in recognizing her photographer if she could see him now--
+with straw in his tousled hair, and his jaw lolling under the weight of
+his terror, and his big, wild eyes staring this way and that.  Nothing
+that Gerbeaux can say to him will dissuade him from the belief that the
+Germans mean to shoot him.
+
+I almost forgot to detail a thing that occurred a few minutes ago, just
+before the Belgian joined us.  Mittendorfer brought a message for the
+little French lieutenant.  The Frenchman roused up and, after they had
+saluted each other ceremoniously, Mittendorfer told him he had come to
+invite him to dine with a mess of German officers across the way, in the
+town hall.
+
+On the way out he stopped to speak with Sergeant Rosenthal who, having
+furnished the provender for the forthcoming feast, was now waiting to
+share in it.  Using German, the lieutenant said:
+
+"I'm being kept pretty busy.  Two citizens of this town have just been
+sentenced to be shot, and I've orders to go and attend to the shooting
+before it gets too dark for the firing squad to see to aim."
+
+Rosenthal did not ask of what crime the condemned two had been
+convicted.
+
+"You had charge of another execution this morning, didn't you?" he said.
+
+"Yes," answered the lieutenant; "a couple--man and wife.  The man was
+seventy-four years old and the woman was seventy-two.  It was proved
+against them that they put poisoned sugar in the coffee for some of our
+soldiers.  You heard about the case, didn't you?"
+
+"I heard something about it," said Rosenthal.
+
+That was all they said.  After three weeks of war a tragedy like this
+has become commonplace, not only to these soldiers but to us.  Already
+all of us, combatants and onlookers alike, have seen so many horrors
+that one more produces no shock in our minds.  It will take a wholesale
+killing to excite us; these minor incidents no longer count with us.  If
+I wrote all day I do not believe I could make the meaning of war, in its
+effects on the minds of those who view it at close hand, any clearer.  I
+shall not try.
+
+Six-fifteen p.m.  We have dined.  The omelet was a very small omelet,
+and two skinny pullets do not go far among nine hungry men; still, we
+have dined.
+
+My journal breaks off with this entry.  It broke off because immediately
+after dinner word came that our train was ready.  A few minutes before
+we left the taverne for the station, to start on a trip that was to last
+two days instead of three hours, and land us not in Brussels, but on
+German soil in Aix-la-Chapelle, two incidents happened which afterward,
+in looking back on the experience, I have found most firmly clinched in
+my memory: A German captain came into the place to get a drink; he
+recognized me as an American and hailed me, and wanted to know my
+business and whether I could give him any news from the outside world.
+I remarked on the perfection of his English.
+
+"I suppose I come by it naturally," he said.  "I call myself a German,
+but I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and partly reared in New Jersey,
+and educated at Princeton; and at this moment I am a member of the New
+York Cotton Exchange."
+
+Right after this three Belgian peasants, all half-grown boys, were
+brought in.  They had run away from their homes at the coming of the
+Germans, and for three days had been hiding in thickets, without food,
+until finally hunger and cold had driven them in.
+
+All of them were in sorry case and one was in collapse.  He trembled so
+his whole body shook like jelly.  The landlady gave him some brandy, but
+the burning stuff choked his throat until it closed and the brandy ran
+out of his quivering blue lips and spilled on his chin.  Seeing this, a
+husky German private, who looked as though in private life he might be a
+piano mover, brought out of his blanket roll a bottle of white wine and,
+holding the scared, exhausted lad against his chest, ministered to him
+with all gentleness, and gave him sips of the wine.  In the line of duty
+I suppose he would have shot that boy with the same cheerful readiness.
+
+Just as we were filing out into the dark, Sergeant Rosenthal, who was
+also going along, halted us and reminded us all and severally that we
+were not prisoners, but still guests; and that, though we were to march
+with the prisoners to the station, we were to go in line with the
+guards; and if any prisoner sought to escape it was hoped that we would
+aid in recapturing the runaway.  So we promised him, each on his word of
+honor, that we would do this; and he insisted that we should shake hands
+with him as a pledge and as a token of mutual confidence, which we
+accordingly did.  Altogether it was quite an impressive little
+ceremonial--and rather dramatic, I imagine.
+
+As he left us, however, he was heard, speaking in German, to say sotto
+voce to one of the guards:
+
+"If one of those journalists tries to slip away don't take any chances--
+shoot him at once!"
+
+It is so easy to keep one's honor intact when you have moral support in
+the shape of an earnest-minded German soldier, with a gun, stepping
+along six feet behind you.  My honor was never safer.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 6
+
+With the German Wrecking Crew
+
+
+When we came out of the little taverne at Beaumont, to start--as we
+fondly supposed--for Brussels, it was pitch dark in the square of the
+forlorn little town.  With us the polite and pleasant fiction that we
+were guests of the German authorities had already worn seedy, not to say
+threadbare, but Lieutenant Mittendorfer persisted in keeping the little
+romance alive.  For, as you remember, we had been requested--requested,
+mind you, and not ordered--to march to the station with the armed escort
+that would be in charge of the prisoners of war, and it had been
+impressed upon us that we were to assist in guarding the convoy,
+although no one of us had any more deadly weapon in his possession than
+a fountain pen; and finally, according to our instructions, if any
+prisoner attempted to escape in the dark we were to lay detaining hands
+upon him and hold him fast.
+
+This was all very flattering and very indicative of the esteem in which
+the military authorities of Beaumont seemed to hold us.  But we were not
+puffed up with a sense of our new responsibilities.  Also we were as a
+unit in agreeing that under no provocation would we yield to temptations
+to embark on any side-excursions upon the way to the railroad.
+Personally I know that I was particularly firm upon this point.  I would
+defy that column to move so fast that I could not keep up with it.
+
+In the black gloom we could make out a longish clump of men who stood
+four abreast, scuffling their feet upon the miry wet stones of the
+square.  These were the prisoners--one hundred and fifty Frenchmen and
+Turcos, eighty Englishmen and eight Belgians. From them, as we drew
+near, an odor of wet, unwashed animals arose.  It was as rank and raw as
+fumes from crude ammonia.  Then, in the town house of the Prince de
+Caraman-Chimay just alongside, the double doors opened, and the light
+streaming out fell upon the naked bayonets over the shoulders of the
+sentries and made them look like slanting lines of rain.
+
+There were eight of us by now in the party of guests, our original group
+of five having been swollen by the addition of three others--the
+Frenchman Gerbeaux, the American artist Stevens and the Belgian court-
+photographer Hennebert, who had been under arrest for five days.  We
+eight, obeying instructions--no, requests--found places for ourselves in
+the double files of guards, four going one side of the column and four
+the other.  I slipped into a gap on the left flank, alongside four of
+the English soldiers.  The guard immediately behind me was a man I knew.
+He had been on duty the afternoon previous in the place where we were
+being kept, and he had been obliging enough to let me exercise my few
+words of German upon him.  He grinned now in recognition and humorously
+patted the stock of his rifle--this last, I take it, being his effort to
+convey to my understanding that he was under orders to shoot me in the
+event of my seeking to play truant during the next hour or so.  He
+didn't know me--wild horses could not have dragged us apart.
+
+A considerable wait ensued.  Officers, coming back from the day's battle
+lines in automobiles, jumped out of their cars and pressed up,
+bedraggled and wet through from the rain which had been falling, to have
+a look at the prisoners.  Common soldiers appeared also.  Of these
+latter many, I judged, had newly arrived at the front and had never seen
+any captured enemies before.  They were particularly interested in the
+Englishmen, who as nearly as I could tell endured the scrutinizing
+pretty well, whereas the Frenchmen grew uneasy and self-conscious under
+it.  We who were in civilian dress--and pretty shabby civilian dress at
+that--came in for our share of examination too. The sentries were kept
+busy explaining to newcomers that we were not spies going north for
+trial.  There was little or no jeering at the prisoners.
+
+Lieutenant Mittendorfer appeared to feel the burden of his authority
+mightily.  His importance expressed itself in many bellowing commands to
+his men.  As he passed the door of headquarters, booming like a Prussian
+night-bittern, one of the officers there checked him with a gesture.
+
+"Why all the noise, Herr Lieutenant?" he said pleasantly in German.
+"Cannot this thing be done more quietly?"
+
+The young man took the hint, and when he climbed upon a bench outside
+the wine-shop door his voice was much milder as he admonished the
+prisoners that they would be treated with due honors of war if they
+obeyed their warders promptly during the coming journey, but that the
+least sign of rebellion among them would mean but one thing--immediate
+death.  Since he spoke in German, a young French lieutenant translated
+the warning for the benefit of the Frenchmen and the Belgians, and a
+British noncom. did the same for his fellow countrymen, speaking with a
+strong Scottish burr.  He wound up with an improvisation of his own,
+which I thought was typically British.  "Now, then, boys," he sang out,
+"buck up, all of you! It might be worse, you know, and some of these
+German chaps don't seem a bad lot at all."
+
+So, with that, Lieutenant Mittendorfer blew out his big chest and barked
+an order into the night, and away we all swung off at a double quick,
+with our feet slipping and sliding upon the travel-worn granite boulders
+underfoot.  In addition to being rounded and unevenly laid, the stones
+were now coated with a layer of slimy mud.  It was a hard job to stay
+upright on them.
+
+I don't think I shall ever forget that march.  I know I shall never
+forget that smell, or the sound of all our feet clumping over those
+slick cobbles.  Nor shall I forget, either, the appealing calls of
+Gerbeaux' black chauffeur, who was being left behind in the now empty
+guardhouse, and who, to judge from his tones, did not expect ever to see
+any of us again.  As a matter of fact, I ran across him two weeks later
+in Liege.  He had just been released and was trying to make his way back
+to Brussels.
+
+The way ahead of us was inky black.  The outlines of the tall Belgian
+houses on either side of the narrow street were barely visible, for
+there were no lights in the windows at all and only dim candles or oil
+lamps in the lower floors.  No natives showed themselves.  I do not
+recollect that in all that mile-long tramp I saw a single Belgian
+civilian--only soldiers, shoving forward curiously as we passed and
+pressing the files closer in together.
+
+Through one street we went and into another which if anything was even
+narrower and blacker than the first, and presently we could tell by the
+feel of things under our feet that we had quit the paved road and were
+traversing soft earth.  We entered railway sidings, stumbling over the
+tracks, and at the far end of the yard emerged into a sudden glare of
+brightness and drew up alongside a string of cars.
+
+After the darkness the flaring brilliancy made us blink and then it made
+us wonder there should be any lights at all, seeing that the French
+troops, in retiring from Beaumont four days before, had done their
+hurried best to cripple the transportation facilities and had certainly
+put the local gas plant out of commission.  Yet here was illumination in
+plenty and to spare.  At once the phenomenon stood explained.  Two days
+after securing this end of the line the German engineers had repaired
+the torn-up right-of-way and installed a complete acetylene outfit, and
+already they were dispatching trains of troops and munitions clear
+across southeastern Belgium to and from the German frontier.  When we
+heard this we quit marveling.  We had by now ceased to wonder at the
+lightning rapidity and un-human efficiency of the German military system
+in the field.
+
+Under the sizzling acetylene torches we had our first good look at these
+prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly prisoners.
+
+Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle.  A
+soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden
+a pitiable, almost a contemptible object.  You think instinctively of an
+adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of
+teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more
+impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in
+the first place. These similes are poor ones, I'm afraid, but I find it
+difficult to put my thoughts exactly into words.
+
+These particular soldiers were most unhappy looking, all except the half
+dozen Turcos among the Frenchmen.  They spraddled their baggy white legs
+and grinned comfortably, baring fine double rows of ivory in their brown
+faces.  The others mainly were droopy figures of misery and shame.  By
+reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung down in
+their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red trousers
+and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed
+themselves especially unkempt and frowzy-looking.  Almost to a man they
+were dark, lean, slouchy fellows; they were from the south of France, we
+judged.  Certainly with a week's growth of black whiskers upon their
+jaws they were fit now to play stage brigands without further make-up.
+
+"Wot a bloomin', stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from
+where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies.  "There
+ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink in it,
+too."
+
+A little whiny man alongside of me, whose chin was on his breast bone,
+spake downward along his gray flannel shirt bosom:
+
+"Just wyte," he said; "just wyte till England 'ears wot they done to us,
+'erdin' us about like cattle.  Blighters!" He spat his disgust upon the
+ground.
+
+We spoke to none of them directly, nor they to us--that also being a
+condition imposed by Mittendorfer.
+
+The train was composed of several small box cars and one second-class
+passenger coach of German manufacture with a dumpy little locomotive at
+either end, one to pull and one to push.  In profile it would have
+reminded you somewhat of the wrecking trains that go to disasters in
+America.  The prisoners were loaded aboard the box cars like so many
+sheep, with alert gray shepherds behind them, carrying guns in lieu of
+crooks; and, being entrained, they were bedded down for the night upon
+straw.
+
+The civilians composing our party were bidden to climb aboard the
+passenger coach, where the eight of us, two of the number being of
+augmented super-adult size, took possession of a compartment meant to
+hold six.  The other compartments were occupied by wounded Germans,
+except one compartment, which was set aside for the captive French
+lieutenant and two British subalterns.  Top-Sergeant Rosenthal was in
+charge of the train with headquarters aboard our coach.  With him, as
+aides, he had three Red Cross men.
+
+The lighting apparatus of the car did not operate.  On the ledge of our
+window sat a small oil lamp, sending out a rich smell and a pale, puny
+illumination.  Just before we pulled out Rosenthal came and blew out the
+lamp, leaving the wick to smoke abominably.  He explained that he did
+this for our own well-being.  Belgian snipers just outside the town had
+been firing into the passing trains, he said, and a light in a car
+window was but an added temptation.  He advised us that if shooting
+started we should drop upon the floor. We assured him in chorus that we
+would, and then after adding that we must not be surprised if the
+Belgians derailed the train during the night he went away, leaving us
+packed snugly in together in the dark.  This incident had a tendency to
+discourage light conversation among us for some minutes.
+
+Possibly it was because daylight travel would be safer travel, or it may
+have been for some other good and sufficient reason, that after
+traveling some six or eight miles joltingly we stopped in the edge of a
+small village and stayed there until after sun-up. That was a hard night
+for sleeping purposes.  One of our party, who was a small man, climbed
+up into the baggage net above one row of seats and stretched himself
+stiffly in the narrow hammock-like arrangement, fearing to move lest he
+tumble down on the heads of his fellow-sufferers.  Another laid him down
+in the little aisle flanking the compartment, where at least he might
+spraddle his limbs and where also, persons passing the length of the car
+stepped upon his face and figure from time to time.  This interfered
+with his rest. The remaining six of us mortised ourselves into the seats
+in neck-cricking attitudes, with our legs so intertwined and mingled
+that when one man got up to stretch himself he had to use great care in
+picking out his own legs.  Sometimes he could only tell that it was his
+leg by pinching it.  This was especially so after inaction had put his
+extremities to sleep while the rest of him remained wide awake.
+
+After dawn we ran slowly to Charleroi, the center of the Belgian iron
+industry, in a sterile land of mines and smelters and slag-heaps, and
+bleak, bare, ore-stained hillsides.  The Germans had fought here, first
+with organized troops of the Allies, and later, by their own telling,
+with bushwhacking civilians.  Whole rows of houses upon either side of
+the track had been ventilated by shells or burned out with fire, and
+their gable ends, lacking roofs, now stood up nakedly, fretting the
+skyline like gigantic saw teeth.  As we were drawing out from between
+these twin rows of ruins we saw a German sergeant in a flower plot
+alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump
+of tall red geraniums.  That he could find time in the midst of that
+hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically
+German bit of sentimentalism.  Just then, though, he stood erect and we
+were better informed.  He had been talking over a military telephone,
+the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter
+snuggling beneath the geraniums.  The flowers even were being made to
+contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism of war.  I think,
+though, that it took a composite German mind to evolve that expedient.
+A Prussian would bring along the telephone; a Saxon would bed it among
+the blossoms.
+
+We progressed onward by a process of alternate stops and starts, through
+a land bearing remarkably few traces to show for its recent chastening
+with sword and torch, until in the middle of the blazing hot forenoon we
+came to Gembloux, which I think must be the place where all the flies in
+Belgium are spawned.  Here on a siding we lay all day, grilled in the
+heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger vermin, while troop
+trains without number passed us, hurrying along the sentry-guarded
+railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium.  Every box-car door made a
+frame for a group-picture of broad German faces and bulky German bodies.
+Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers had lashed limbs of trees
+and big clumps of field flowers.  Also with colored chalks they had
+extensively frescoed the wooden walls as high up as they could reach.
+The commonest legend was "On to Paris," or for variety "To Paris
+Direct," but occasionally a lighter touch showed itself.  For example,
+one wag had inscribed on a car door: "Declarations of War Received
+Here," and another had drawn a highly impressionistic likeness of his
+Kaiser, and under it had inscribed "Wilhelm II, Emperor of Europe."
+
+Presently as train after train, loaded sometimes with guns or supplies
+but usually with men, clanked by, it began to dawn upon us that these
+soldiers were of a different physical type from the soldiers we had seen
+heretofore.  They were all Germans, to be sure, but the men along the
+front were younger men, hard-bitten and trained down, with the face
+which we had begun to call the Teutonic fighting face, whereas these men
+were older, and of a heavier port and fuller fashion of countenance.
+Also some of them wore blue coats, red-trimmed, instead of the dull gray
+service garb of the troops in the first invading columns.  Indeed some
+of them even wore a nondescript mixture of uniform and civilian garb.
+They were Landwehr and Landsturm, troops of the third and fourth lines,
+going now to police the roads and garrison the captured towns, and hold
+the lines of communication open while the first line, who were picked
+troops, and the second line, who were reservists, pressed ahead into
+France.
+
+They showed a childlike curiosity to see the prisoners in the box cars
+behind us.  They grinned triumphantly at the Frenchmen and the
+Britishers, but the sight of a Turco in his short jacket and his dirty
+white skirts invariably set them off in derisive cat-calling and
+whooping.  One beefy cavalryman in his forties, who looked the Bavarian
+peasant all over, boarded our car to see what might be seen.  He had
+been drinking.  He came nearer being drunk outright than any German
+soldier I had seen to date.  Because he heard us talking English he
+insisted on regarding us as English spies.
+
+"Hark! they betray themselves," we heard him mutter thickly to one of
+his wounded countrymen in the next compartment.  "They are damned
+Englishers."
+
+"Nein! Nein! All Americans," we heard the other say.
+
+"Well, if they are Americans, why don't they talk the American language
+then?" he demanded.  Hearing this, I was sorry I had neglected in my
+youth to learn Choctaw.
+
+Still dubious of us, he came now and stood in the aisle, rocking
+slightly on his bolster legs and eying us glassily.  Eventually a
+thought pierced the fog of his understanding.  He hauled his saber out
+of its scabbard and invited us to run our fingers along the edge and see
+how keen and sharp it was.  He added, with appropriate gestures, that he
+had honed it with the particular intent of slicing off a few English
+heads.  For one, and speaking for one only, I may say I was, on the
+whole, rather glad when he departed from among us.
+
+When we grew tired of watching the troop trains streaming south we
+fought the flies, and listened for perhaps the tenth time to the story
+of Stevens' experience when he first fell into German hands, six days
+before.
+
+Stevens was the young American who accompanied Gerbeaux, the Frenchman,
+and Hennebert, the Belgian, on their ill-timed expedition from Brussels
+in an automobile bearing without authority a Red Cross flag.  Gerbeaux
+was out to get a story for the Chicago paper which he served as Brussels
+correspondent, and the Belgian hoped to take some photographs; but a
+pure love of excitement brought Stevens along.  He had his passport to
+prove his citizenship and a pass from General von Jarotzky, military
+commandant of Brussels, authorizing him to pass through the lines.  He
+thought he was perfectly safe.
+
+When their machine was halted by the Germans a short distance south and
+west of Waterloo, Stevens, for some reason which he could never
+understand, was separated from his two companions and the South-African
+negro chauffeur.  A sergeant took him in charge, and all the rest of the
+day he rode on the tail of a baggage wagon with a guard upon either side
+of him.  First, though, he was searched and all his papers were taken
+from him.
+
+Late in the afternoon the pack-train halted and as Stevens was
+stretching his legs in a field a first lieutenant, whom he described as
+being tall and nervous and highly excitable, ran up and, after berating
+the two guards for not having their rifles ready to fire, he poked a gun
+under Stevens' nose and went through the process of loading it,
+meanwhile telling him that if he moved an inch his brains would be blown
+out.  A sergeant gently edged Stevens back out of the danger belt, and,
+from behind the officer's back another man, so Stevens said, tapped
+himself gently upon the forehead to indicate that the Herr Lieutenant
+was cracked in the brain.
+
+After this Stevens was taken into an improvised barracks in a deserted
+Belgian gendarmerie and locked in a room.  At nine o'clock the
+lieutenant came to him and told him in a mixture of French and German
+that he had by a court-martial been found guilty of being an English spy
+and that at six o'clock the following morning he would be shot. "When
+you hear a bugle sound you may know that is the signal for your
+execution," the officer added.
+
+While poor Stevens was still begging for an opportunity to be heard in
+his own defense the lieutenant dealt him a blow in the side which left
+him temporarily breathless.  In a moment two soldiers had crossed his
+wrists behind his back and were lashing them tightly together with a
+rope.
+
+Thus bound he was taken back indoors and made to sit on a bench.  Eight
+soldiers stretched themselves upon the floor of the room and slept
+there; a sergeant slept with his body across the door.  A guard sat on
+the bench beside Stevens.
+
+"He gave me two big slugs of brandy to drink," said Stevens, continuing
+his tale, "and it affected me no more than so much water.  After a
+couple of hours I managed to work the cords loose and I got one hand
+free.  Moving cautiously I lifted my feet, and by stretching my arms
+cautiously down, still holding them behind my back, I untied one shoe.
+I meant at the last to kick off my shoes and run for it.  I was feeling
+for the laces on my other shoe when another guard came to re-enforce the
+first, and he watched me so closely that I knew that chance was gone.
+
+"After a while, strange as it seems, all the fear and all the horror of
+death left me.  My chief regret now was, not that I had to die, but that
+my people at home would never know how I died or where.  I put my head
+down on the table and actually dozed off.  But there was a clock in the
+room and whenever it struck I would rouse up and say to myself, almost
+impersonally, that I now had four hours to live, or three, or two, as
+the case might be.  Then I would go to sleep again.  Once or twice a
+queer sinking sensation in my stomach, such as I never felt before,
+would come to me, but toward daylight this ceased to occur.
+
+"At half-past five two soldiers, one carrying a spade and the other a
+lantern, came in. They lit the lantern at a lamp that burned on a table
+in front of me and went out. Presently I could hear them digging in the
+yard outside the door.  I believed it was my grave they were digging.  I
+cannot recall that this made any particular impression upon me.  I
+considered it in a most casual sort of fashion.  I remember wondering
+whether it was a deep grave.
+
+"At five minutes before six a bugle sounded.  The eight men on the floor
+got up, buckled on their cartridge belts, shouldered their rifles and,
+leaving their knapsacks behind, tramped out.  I followed with my guards
+upon either side of me.  My one fear now was that I should tremble at
+the end.  I felt no fear, but I was afraid my knees would shake.  I
+remember how relieved I was when I took the first step to find my legs
+did not tremble under me.
+
+"I was resolved, too, that I would not be shot down with my hands tied
+behind me.  When I faced the squad I meant to shake off the ropes on my
+wrists and take the volley with my arms at my sides."
+
+Stevens was marched to the center of the courtyard.  Then, without a
+word of explanation to him his bonds were removed and he was put in an
+automobile and carried off to rejoin the other members of the unlucky
+sightseeing party.  He never did find out whether he had been made the
+butt of a hideous practical joke by a half-mad brute or whether his
+tormentor really meant to send him to death and was deterred at the last
+moment by fear of the consequences.  One thing he did learn--there had
+been no court-martial.  Thereafter, during his captivity, Stevens was
+treated with the utmost kindness by all the officers with whom he came
+in contact.  His was the only instance that I have knowledge of where a
+prisoner has been tortured, physically or mentally, by a German.  It was
+curious that in this one case the victim should have been an American
+citizen whose intentions were perfectly innocent and whose papers were
+orthodox and unquestionable.
+
+Glancing back over what I have here written down I find I have failed
+altogether to mention the food which we ate on that trip of ours with
+the German wrecking crew.  It was hardly worth mentioning, it was so
+scanty.
+
+We had to eat, during that day while we lay at Gembloux, a loaf of the
+sourish soldiers' black bread, with green mold upon the crust, and a pot
+of rancid honey which one of the party had bethought him to bring from
+Beaumont in his pocket.  To wash this mixture down we had a few swigs of
+miserably bad lukewarm ration-coffee from a private's canteen, a bottle
+of confiscated Belgian mineral water, which a private at Charleroi gave
+us from his store, and a precious quart of the Prince de Caraman-
+Chimay's commandeered wine--also a souvenir of our captivity.  Late in
+the afternoon a sergeant sold us for a five-mark piece a big skin-casing
+filled with half-raw pork sausage.  I've never tasted anything better.
+
+Even so, we fared better than the prisoners in the box cars behind and
+the dozen wounded men in the coach with us.  They had only coffee and
+dry bread and, at the latter end of the long day, a few chunks of the
+sausage.  Some of the wounded men were pretty badly hurt, too.  There
+was one whose left forearm had been half shot away.  His stiff fingers
+protruded beyond his soiled bandages and they were still crusted with
+dried blood and grained with dirt.  Another had been pierced through the
+jaw with a bullet.  That part of his face which showed through the
+swathings about his head was terribly swollen and purple with congested
+blood.  The others had flesh wounds, mainly in their sides or their
+legs.  Some of them were feverish; all of them sorely needed clean
+garments for their bodies and fresh dressings for their hurts and proper
+food for their stomachs.  Yet I did not hear one of them complain or
+groan.
+
+With that oxlike patience of the North-European peasant breed, which
+seems accentuated in these Germans in time of war, they quietly endured
+what was acute discomfort for any sound man to have to endure.  In some
+dim, dumb fashion of their own they seemed, each one of them, to
+comprehend that in the vast organism of an army at war the individual
+unit does not count.  To himself he may be of prime importance and first
+consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a
+mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm--an infinitesimal, utterly
+inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought.  Thus we
+diagnosed their mental poses.  Along toward five o'clock a goodish
+string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars
+seven hundred French soldiers, who had been collected at Gembloux, were
+loaded. With the Frenchmen as they marched under our window went,
+perhaps, twenty civilian prisoners, including two priests and three or
+four subdued little men who looked as though they might be civic
+dignitaries of some small Belgian town.  In the squad was one big,
+broad-shouldered peasant in a blouse, whose arms were roped back at the
+elbows with a thick cord.
+
+"Do you see that man?" said one of our guards excitedly, and he pointed
+at the pinioned man.  "He is a grave robber.  He has been digging up
+dead Germans to rob the bodies. They tell me that when they caught him
+he had in his pockets ten dead men's fingers which he had cut off with a
+knife because the flesh was so swollen he could not slip the rings off.
+He will be shot, that fellow."
+
+We looked with a deeper interest then at the man whose arms were bound,
+but privately we permitted ourselves to be skeptical regarding the
+details of his alleged ghoulishness. We had begun to discount German
+stories of Belgian atrocities and Belgian stories of German atrocities.
+I might add that I am still discounting both varieties.
+
+To help along our train two more little engines were added, but even
+with four of them to draw and to shove their load was now so heavy that
+we were jerked along with sensations as though we were having a jaw
+tooth pulled every few seconds.  After such a fashion we progressed very
+slowly.  Already we knew that we were not going to Brussels, as we had
+been promised in Beaumont that we should go.  We only hoped we were not
+bound for a German military fortress in some interior city.
+
+It fell to my lot that second night to sleep in the aisle.  In spite of
+being walked on at intervals I slept pretty well.  When I waked it was
+three o'clock in the morning, just, and we were standing in the train
+shed at Liege, and hospital corps men were coming aboard with hot coffee
+and more raw sausages for the wounded.  Among the Germans, sausages are
+used medicinally.  I think they must keep supplies of sausages in their
+homes, for use in cases of accident and sickness.
+
+I got up and looked from the window.  The station was full of soldiers
+moving about on various errands.  Overhead big arc lights sputtered
+spitefully, so that the place was almost as bright as day.  Almost
+directly below me was a big table, which stood on the platform and was
+covered over with papers and maps.  At the table sat two officers--high
+officers, I judged--writing busily.  Their stiff white cuff-ends showed
+below their coat-sleeves; their slim black boots were highly polished,
+and altogether they had the look of having just escaped from the hands
+of a valet.  Between them and the frowsy privates was a gulf a thousand
+miles wide and a thousand miles deep.
+
+When I woke again it was broad daylight and we had crossed the border
+and were in Germany.  At small way stations women and girls wearing long
+white aprons and hospital badges came under the car windows with hot
+drinks and bacon sandwiches for the wounded.  They gave us some, too,
+and, I think, bestowed what was left upon the prisoners at the rear.  We
+ran now through a land untouched by war, where prim farmhouses stood in
+prim gardens.  It was Sunday morning and the people were going to church
+dressed in their Sunday best. Considering that Germany was supposed to
+have been drained of its able-bodied male adults for war-making purposes
+we saw, among the groups, an astonishingly large number of men of
+military age.  By contrast with the harried country from which we had
+just emerged this seemed a small Paradise of peace. Over there in
+Belgium all the conditions of life had been disorganized and undone,
+where they had not been wrecked outright.  Over here in Germany the calm
+was entirely unruffled.
+
+It shamed us to come as we were into such surroundings.  For our car was
+littered with sausage skins and bread crusts, and filth less pleasant to
+look at and stenches of many sorts abounded.  Indeed I shall go further
+and say that it stank most fearsomely.  As for us, we felt ourselves to
+be infamous offenses against the bright, clean day.  We had not slept in
+a bed for five nights or had our clothes off for that time.  For three
+days none of us had eaten a real meal at a regular table.  For two days
+we had not washed our faces and hands.
+
+The prisoners of war went on to Cologne to be put in a laager, but we
+were bidden to detrain at Aix-la-Chapelle.  We climbed off, a dirty,
+wrinkled, unshaven troop of vagabonds, to find ourselves free to go
+where we pleased.
+
+That is, we thought so at first. But by evening the Frenchman and the
+Belgians had been taken away to be held in prison until the end of the
+war, and for two days the highly efficient local secret-service staff
+kept the rest of us under its watchful care.  After that, though, the
+American consul, Robert J. Thompson, succeeded in convincing the
+military authorities that we were not dangerous.
+
+I still think that taking copious baths and getting ourselves shaved
+helped to clear us of suspicion.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 7
+
+The Grapes of Wrath
+
+
+There is a corner of Rhenish Prussia that shoulders up against Holland
+and drives a nudging elbow deep into the ribs of Belgium; and right
+here, at the place where the three countries meet, stands Charlemagne's
+ancient city of Aix-la-Chapelle, called Aachen by the Germans.
+
+To go from the middle of Aix-la-Chapelle to the Dutch boundary takes
+twenty minutes on a tram-car, and to go to the Belgian line requires an
+even hour in a horse-drawn vehicle, and considerably less than that
+presuming you go by automobile.  So you see the toes of the town touch
+two foreign frontiers; and of all German cities it is the most westerly
+and, therefore, closest of all to the zone of action in the west of
+Europe.
+
+You would never guess it, however.  When we landed in Aix-la-Chapelle,
+coming out of the heart of the late August hostilities in Belgium, we
+marveled; for, behold, here was a clean, white city that, so far as the
+look of it and the feel of it went, might have been a thousand miles
+from the sound of gunfire.  On that Sabbath morning of our arrival an
+air of everlasting peace abode with it.  That same air of peace
+continued to abide with it during all the days we spent here.  Yet, if
+you took a step to the southwest--a figurative step in seven-league
+boots--you were where all hell broke loose.  War is a most tremendous
+emphasizer of contrasts.
+
+These lines were written late in September, in a hotel room at Aix-la-
+Chapelle.  The writing of them followed close on an automobile trip to
+Liege, through a district blasted by war and corrugated with long
+trenches where those who died with their boots on still lie with their
+boots on.
+
+Let me, if I can, draw two pictures--one of this German outpost town,
+and the other of the things that might be seen four or five miles
+distant over the border.
+
+I have been told that, in the first flurry of the breaking out of the
+World-War, Aix was not placid.  It went spy-mad, just as all Europe went
+spy-mad--a mania from which this Continent has not entirely recovered by
+any means.  There was a great rounding up of suspected aliens.  Every
+loyal citizen resolved himself or herself into a self-appointed
+policeman, to watch the movements of those suspected of being disloyal.
+Also, they tell me, when the magic mobilization began and troops poured
+through without ceasing for four days and four nights, and fighting
+broke out just the other side of the Belgian customhouse, on the main
+high road to Liege, there was excitement.  But all that was over long
+before we came.
+
+The war has gone onward, down into France; and all the people know is
+what the official bulletins tell them; in fact, I think they must know
+less about operations and results than our own people in America.  I
+know not what the opportunity of the spectator may have been with regard
+to other wars, but certainly in this war it is true that the nearer you
+get to it the less you understand of its scope.
+
+All about you, on every side, is a screen of secrecy.  Once in a while
+it parts for a moment, and through the rift you catch a glimpse of the
+movement of armies and the swing and sweep of campaigns.  Then the
+curtain closes and again you are shut in.
+
+Let me put the case in another way: It is as though we who are at the
+front, or close to it, stand before a mighty painting, but with our
+noses almost touching the canvas.  You who are farther away see the
+whole picture.  We, for the moment, see only so much of it as you might
+cover with your two hands; but this advantage we do have--that we see
+the brush strokes, the color shadings, the infinite small detail,
+whereas you view its wider effects.
+
+And then, having seen it, when we try to put our story into words--when
+we try to set down on paper the unspeakable horror of it--we realize
+what a futile, incomplete thing the English language is.
+
+This present day in Aix-la-Chapelle will be, I assume, much like all the
+other days I have spent here.  An hour ago small official bulletins,
+sanctioned by the Berlin War Office, were posted in the windows of the
+shops and on the front of the public buildings; and small groups
+gathered before them to read the news.
+
+If it was good news they took it calmly.  If it was not so good, still
+they took it calmly.  If it was outright bad news I think they would
+still take it calmly.  For, come good or evil, they are all possessed
+now with the belief that, in the long run, Germany must win.  Their
+confidence is supreme.
+
+It was characteristic of them, though, that, until word came of the
+first German success, there was no general flying of flags in the town.
+Now flags are up everywhere--the colors of the Empire and of Prussia,
+and often enough just a huge yellow square bearing the spraddled, black,
+spidery design of the Imperial eagle.  But there is never any hysteria;
+I don't believe these Prussians know the meaning of the word.  It is
+safe to assume that out of every three grown men in front of a bulletin
+one will be a soldier.
+
+Yet, considering that Germany is supposed, at this moment, to have
+upward of five million men in the field or under arms, and that
+approximately two millions more, who were exempt from call by reason of
+age or other disabilities, are said to have volunteered, you would be
+astonished to see how many men in civilian dress are on the streets.
+Whether in uniform or not, though, these men are at work after some
+fashion or other for their country.  Practically all the physicians in
+Aix are serving in the hospitals. The rich men--the men of affairs--are
+acting as military clerks at headquarters or driving Red Cross cars.
+The local censor of the telegraph is over eighty years old--a splendid-
+looking old white giant, who won the Iron Cross in the Franco-Prussian
+War and retired with the rank of general years and years ago.  Now, in
+full uniform, he works twelve hard hours a day.  The head waiter at this
+hotel told me yesterday that he expected to be summoned to the colors in
+a day or two.  He has had his notice and is ready to go.  He is more
+than forty years old.  I know my room waiter kept watch on me until he
+satisfied himself I was what I claimed to be--an American--and not an
+English spy posing as an American.
+
+So, at first, did the cheery little girl cashier in the Arcade barber
+shop downstairs.  For all I know, she may still have me under suspicion
+and be making daily reports on me to the secret-service people.  The
+women help, too--and the children.  The wives and daughters of the
+wealthiest men in the town are minding the sick and the wounded.  The
+mothers and the younger girls meet daily to make hospital supplies.
+Women come to you in the cafes at night, wearing Red Cross badges on
+their left arms, and shaking sealed tin canisters into which you are
+expected to drop contributions for invalided soldiers.
+
+Since so many of their teachers are carrying rifles or wearing swords,
+the pupils of the grammar schools and the high schools are being
+organized into squads of crop-gatherers.  Beginning next week, so I
+hear, they will go out into the fields and the orchards to assist in the
+harvesting of the grain and the fruit.  For lack of hands to get it
+under cover the wheat has already begun to suffer; but the boys and
+girls will bring it in.
+
+It is now half-past eleven o'clock in the forenoon.  At noon, sharp, an
+excellent orchestra will begin to play in the big white casino
+maintained by the city, just opposite my hotel.  It will play for an
+hour then, and again this afternoon, and again, weather permitting,
+to-night.
+
+The townspeople will sit about at small, white tables and listen to the
+music while they sip their beer or drink their coffee.  They will be
+soberer and less vivacious than I imagine they were two months ago; but
+then these North Germans are a sober-minded race anyhow, and they take
+their amusements quietly.  Also, they have taken the bad tidings of the
+last few days from France very quietly.
+
+During the afternoon crowds will gather on the viaduct, just above the
+principal railroad station, where they will stand for hours looking down
+over the parapet into the yards below.  There will be smaller crowds on
+the heights of Ronheide, on the edge of the town, where the tracks enter
+the long tunnel under one of the hills that etch the boundary between
+Germany and Belgium.
+
+Rain or shine, these two places are sure to be black with people, for
+here they may see the trains shuttle by, like long bobbins in a loom
+that never ceases from its weaving--trains going west loaded with
+soldiers and naval reservists bound for the front, and trains headed
+east bearing prisoners and wounded.  The raw material passes one way--
+that's the new troops; the finished product passes the other--the
+wounded and the sick.
+
+When wounded men go by there will be cheering, and some of the women are
+sure to raise the song of Die Wacht am Rhein; and within the cars the
+crippled soldiers will take up the chorus feebly.  God knows how many
+able-bodied soldiers already have gone west; how many maimed and
+crippled ones have gone east! In the first instance the number must run
+up into the second million; of the latter there must have been well
+above two hundred thousand.
+
+No dead come back from the front--at least, not this way.  The Germans
+bury their fallen soldiers where they fall.  Regardless of his rank, the
+dead man goes into a trench. If so be he died in battle he is buried,
+booted and dressed just as he died.  And the dead of each day must be
+got underground before midnight of that same day--that is the hard-and-
+fast rule wherever the Germans are holding their ground or pressing
+forward. There they will lie until the Judgment Day, unless their
+kinsfolk be of sufficient wealth and influence to find their burial
+places and dig them up and bring them home privily for interment.  Even
+so, it may be days or even weeks after a man is dead and buried before
+his people hear of it.  It may be they will not hear of it until a
+letter written to him in the care of his regiment and his company comes
+back unopened, with one word in sinister red letters on it--Gefallen!
+
+At this hotel, yesterday, I saw a lady dressed in heavy black.  She had
+the saddest, bravest face I ever looked into, I think.  She sat in the
+restaurant with two other ladies, who were also in black.  The
+octogenarian censor of telegrams passed them on the way out.  To her two
+companions he bowed deeply, but at her side he halted and, bending very
+low, he kissed her hand, and then went away without a word.
+
+The head waiter, who knows all the gossip of the house and of half the
+town besides, told us about her.  Her only son, a lieutenant of
+artillery, was killed at the taking of Liege. It was three days before
+she learned of his death, though she was here in Aachen, only a few
+miles away; for so slowly as this does even bad news travel in war times
+when it pertains to the individual.
+
+Another week elapsed before her husband, who is a lieutenant-colonel,
+could secure leave of absence and return from the French border to seek
+for his son's body; and there was still another week of searching before
+they found it.  It was at the bottom of a trench, under the bodies of a
+score or more of his men; and it was in such a state that the mother had
+not been permitted to look on her dead boy's face.
+
+Such things as this must be common enough hereabouts, but one hears very
+little of them and sees even less.  Aix-la-Chapelle has suffered most
+heavily.  The Aix regiment was shot to pieces in the first day's
+fighting at Liege.  Nearly half its members were killed or wounded; but
+astonishingly few women in mourning are to be seen on the street, and
+none of the men wear those crape arm bands that are so common in Europe
+ordinarily; nor, except about the railroad station, are very many
+wounded to be seen.
+
+There are any number of wounded privates in the local hospitals; but
+there must be a rule against their appearance in public places, for it
+is only occasionally that I meet one abroad.  Slightly wounded officers
+are more plentiful.  I judge from this that no such restriction applies
+to them as applies to the common soldiers.  This hotel is full of them--
+young officers mostly, with their heads tied up or their arms in black
+silk slings, or limping about on canes or crutches.
+
+Until a few days ago the columns of the back pages of the Aix and
+Cologne papers were black-edged with cards inserted by relatives in
+memory of officers who had fallen--"For King and Fatherland!" the cards
+always said.  I counted thirteen of these death notices in one issue of
+a Cologne paper.  Now they have almost disappeared.  I imagine that,
+because of the depressing effect of such a mass of these publications on
+the public mind, the families of killed officers have been asked to
+refrain from reciting their losses in print.  Yet there are not wanting
+signs that the grim total piles up by the hour and the day.
+
+Late this afternoon, when I walk around to the American consulate, I
+shall pass the office of the chief local paper; and there I am sure to
+find anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred men and women waiting for
+the appearance on a bulletin board of the latest list of dead, wounded
+and missing men who are credited to Aix-la-Chapelle and its vicinity.  A
+new list goes up each afternoon, replacing the list of the day before.
+Sometimes it contains but a few names; sometimes a good many.  Then
+there will be piteous scenes for a little while; but presently the
+mourners will go away, struggling to compose themselves as they go; for
+their Kaiser has asked them to make no show of their loss among their
+neighbors.  Having made the supremest sacrifice they can make, short of
+offering up their own lives, they now make another and hide their grief
+away from sight. Surely, this war spares none at all--neither those who
+fight nor those who stay behind.
+
+Toward dusk the streets will fill up with promenaders.  Perhaps a
+regiment or so of troops, temporarily quartered here on the way to the
+front, will clank by, bound for their barracks in divers big music
+halls.  The squares may be quite crowded with uniforms; or there may be
+only one gray coat in proportion to three or four black ones--this last
+is the commoner ratio.  It all depends on the movements of the forces.
+
+To-night the cafes will be open and the moving-picture places will run
+full blast; and the free concert will go on and there will be services
+in the cathedral of Charlemagne.  The cafes that had English names when
+the war began have German ones now.  Thus the Bristol has become the
+Crown Prince Cafe, and the Piccadilly is the Germania; but otherwise
+they are just as they were before the war started, and the business in
+them is quite as good, the residents say, as it ever was.  Prices are no
+higher than they used to be--at least I have not found them high.
+
+After the German fashion the diners will eat slowly and heavily; and
+afterward they will sit in clusters of three or four, drinking mugs of
+Munich or Pilsner, and talking deliberately. At the Crown Prince there
+will be dancing, and at two or three other places there will be music
+and maybe singing; but at the Kaiserhof, where I shall dine, there is
+nothing more exciting than beer and conversation.  It was there, two
+nights ago, I met at the same time three Germans representing three
+dominant classes in the life of their country, and had from each of them
+the viewpoint of his class toward the war.  They were, respectively, a
+business man, a scientist, and a soldier.  The business man belongs to a
+firm of brothers which ranks almost with the Krupps in commercial
+importance.  It has branches in many cities and agencies and plants in
+half a dozen countries.  He said:
+
+"We had not our daily victory to-day, eh? Well, so it goes; we must not
+expect to win always.  We must have reverses, and heavy ones too; but in
+the end we must win.  To lose now would mean national extinction.  To
+win means Germany's commercial and military preeminence in this
+hemisphere.
+
+"There can be but one outcome of this war--either Germany, as an empire,
+will cease to exist, or she will emerge the greatest Power, except the
+United States, on the face of the earth.  And so sure are we of the
+result that to-day my brothers and I bought ground for doubling the size
+and capacity of our largest plant.
+
+"In six weeks from now we shall have beaten France; in six months we
+shall have driven Russia to cover.  For England it will take a year--
+perhaps longer.  And then, as in all games, big and little, the losers
+will pay.  France will be made to pay an indemnity from which she will
+never recover.
+
+"Of Belgium I think we shall take a slice of seacoast; Germany needs
+ports on the English Channel.  Russia will be so humbled that no longer
+will the Muscovite peril threaten Europe.  Great Britain we shall crush
+utterly.  She shall be shorn of her navy and she shall lose her
+colonies--certainly she shall lose India and Egypt.  She will become a
+third-class Power and she will stay a third-class Power.  Forget Japan--
+Germany will punish Japan in due season.
+
+"Within five years from now I predict there will be an offensive and
+defensive alliance of all the Teutonic and all the Scandinavian races of
+Europe, with Bulgaria included, holding absolute dominion over this
+continent and stretching in an unbroken line from the North Sea to the
+Adriatic and the Black Sea.
+
+"Europe is to have a new map, my friends, and Germany will be in the
+middle of that map.  When this has been accomplished we shall talk about
+disarmament--not before. And first, we shall disarm our enemies who
+forced this war on us."
+
+The scientist spoke next.  He is a tall, spectacled, earnest
+Westphalian, who has invented and patented over a hundred separate
+devices used in electric-lighting properties, and, in between, has found
+time to travel round the world several times and write a book or two.
+
+"I do not believe in war," he said.  "War has no place in the
+civilization of the world to-day; but this war was inevitable.  Germany
+had to expand or be suffocated.  And out of this war good will come for
+all the world, especially for Europe.  We Germans are the most
+industrious, the most earnest and the best-educated race on this side of
+the ocean.  To-day one-fourth of the population of Belgium cannot read
+and write.  Under German influence illiteracy will disappear from among
+them.  Russia stands for reaction; England for selfishness and perfidy;
+France for decadence.  Germany stands for progress.  Do not believe the
+claims of our foes that our Kaiser wishes to be another Napoleon and
+hold Europe under his thumb.  What he wants for Germany and what he
+means to have is, first, breathing room for his people; and after that a
+fair share of the commercial opportunities of the world.
+
+"German enlightenment and German institutions will do the reSt. And
+after this war--if we Germans win it--there will never be another
+universal war."
+
+The soldier spoke last. He is a captain of field artillery, a member of
+a distinguished Prussian family, and one of the most noted big-game
+hunters in Europe.  Three weeks ago, in front of Charleroi, a French
+sharpshooter put a bullet in him.  It passed through his left forearm,
+pierced one lung and lodged in the muscles of his breast, where it lies
+imbedded.  In a week from now he expects to rejoin his command.
+
+To look at him you would never guess that he had so recently been
+wounded; his color is high and he moves with the stiff, precise
+alertness of the German army man.  He is still wearing the coat he wore
+in the fight; there are two ragged little holes in the left sleeve and a
+puncture in the side of it; and it is spotted with stiff, dry, brown
+stains.
+
+"I don't presume to know anything about the political or commercial
+aspects of this war," he said over his beer mug; "but I do know this:
+War was forced on us by these other Powers.  They were jealous of us and
+they made the Austrian-Servian quarrel their quarrel.  But when war came
+we were ready and they were not.
+
+"Not until the mobilization was ordered did the people of Germany know
+the color of the field uniform of their soldiers; yet four millions of
+these service uniforms were made and finished and waiting in our
+military storehouses.  Not until after the first shot was fired did we
+who are in the army know how many army corps we had, or the names of
+their commanders, or even the names of the officers composing the
+general staff.
+
+"A week after we took the field our infantry, in heavy marching order,
+was covering fifty kilometers a day--thirty of your American miles--and
+doing it day after day without straggling and without any footsore men
+dropping behind.
+
+"Do these things count in the sum total? I say they do.  Our army will
+win because it deserves to win through being ready and being complete
+and being efficient.  Don't discount the efficiency of our navy either.
+Remember, we Germans have the name of being thorough.  When our fleet
+meets the British fleet I think you will find that we have a few Krupp
+surprises for them."
+
+I may meet these confident gentlemen tonight.  If not, it is highly
+probable I shall meet others who are equally confident, and who will
+express the same views, which they hold because they are the views of
+the German people.
+
+At eleven o'clock, when I start back to the hotel, the streets will be
+almost empty.  Aix will have gone to bed, and in bed it will peacefully
+stay unless a military Zeppelin sails over its rooftrees, making a noise
+like ten million locusts all buzzing at once.  There were two Zeppelins
+aloft last night, and from my window I saw one of them quite plainly.
+It was hanging almost stationary in the northern sky, like a huge yellow
+gourd.  After a while it made off toward the weSt. One day last week
+three of them passed, all bound presumably for Paris or Antwerp, or even
+London.  That time the people grew a bit excited; but now they take a
+Zeppelin much as a matter of course, and only wonder mildly where it
+came from and whither it is going.
+
+As for to-morrow, I imagine to-morrow will be another to-day; but
+yesterday was different. I had a streak of luck.  It is forbidden to
+civilians, and more particularly to correspondents, to go prowling about
+eastern Belgium just now; but I found a friend in a naturalized German-
+American, formerly of Chicago, but living now in Germany, though he
+still retains his citizenship in the United States.
+
+Like every one else in Aachen, he is doing something for the government,
+though I can only guess at the precise nature of his services.  At any
+rate he had an automobile, a scarce thing to find in private hands in
+these times; and, what was more, he had a military pass authorizing him
+to go to Liege and to take two passengers along.  He invited me to go
+with him for a day's ride through the country where the very first blows
+were swapped in the western theater of hostilities.
+
+We started off in the middle of a fickle-minded shower, which first blew
+puffs of wetness in our faces, like spray on a flawy day at sea, and
+then broke off to let the sun shine through for a minute or two.  For
+two or three kilometers after clearing the town we ran through a
+district that smiled with peace and groaned with plenty.  On the
+verandas of funny little gray roadhouses with dripping red roofs
+officers sat over their breakfast coffee.  A string of wagons passed us,
+bound inward, full of big, white, clean-looking German pigs.  A road
+builder, repairing the ruts made by the guns and baggage trains, stood
+aside for us to pass and pulled off his hat to us.  This was Europe as
+it used to be--Europe as most American tourists knew it.
+
+We came to a tall barber pole which a careless painter had striped with
+black on white instead of with red on white, and we knew by that we had
+arrived at the frontier.  Also, there stood alongside the pole a royal
+forest ranger in green, with a queer cockaded hat on his head, doing
+sentry duty.  As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a
+ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out
+of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us,
+not pears, but papers. Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few
+rods by soldiers begging for papers. Some had small wooden sign-boards
+bearing the word Zeitung, which they would lift and swing across the
+path of an approaching automobile.  I began to believe after a while
+that if a man had enough newspapers in stock he could bribe his way
+through the German troops clear into France.
+
+These fellows who gathered about us now were of the Landsturm, men in
+their late thirties and early forties, with long, shaggy mustaches.
+Their kind forms the handle of the mighty hammer whose steel nose is
+battering at France.  Every third one of them wore spectacles, showing
+that the back lines of the army are extensively addicted to the favorite
+Teutonic sport of being nearsighted.  Also, their coat sleeves
+invariably were too long for them, and hid their big hands almost to the
+knuckles.  This is a characteristic I have everywhere noted among the
+German privates.  If the French soldier's coat is over-lengthy in the
+skirt the German's is ultra-generous with cloth in the sleeves.  I saw
+that their hair was beginning to get shaggy, showing that they had been
+in the field some weeks, since every German soldier--officer and private
+alike--leaves the barracks so close-cropped that his skin shows pinky
+through the bristles.  Among them was one chap in blue sailor's garb,
+left behind doubtless when forty-five hundred naval reserves passed
+through three days before to work the big guns in front of Antwerp.
+
+We went on.  At first there was nothing to show we had entered Belgium
+except that the Prussian flag did not hang from a pole in front of every
+farmhouse, but only in front of every fourth house, say, or every fifth
+one.  Then came stretches of drenched fields, vacant except for big
+black ravens and nimble piebald magpies, which bickered among themselves
+in the neglected and matted grain; and then we swung round a curve in
+the rutted roadway and were in the town of Battice.
+
+No; we were not in the town of Battice.  We were where the town of
+Battice had been--where it stood six weeks ago.  It was famous then for
+its fat, rich cheeses and its green damson plums.  Now, and no doubt for
+years to come, it will be chiefly notable as having been the town where,
+it is said, Belgian civilians first fired on the German troops from
+roofs and windows, and where the Germans first inaugurated their
+ruthless system of reprisal on houses and people alike.
+
+Literally this town no longer existed.  It was a scrap-heap, if you
+like, but not a town.  Here had been a great trampling out of the grapes
+of wrath, and most sorrowful was the vintage that remained.
+
+It was a hard thing to level these Belgian houses absolutely, for they
+were mainly built of stone or of thick brick coated over with a hard
+cement.  So, generally, the walls stood, even in Battice; but always the
+roofs were gone, and the window openings were smudged cavities, through
+which you looked and saw square patches of the sky if your eyes inclined
+upward, or else blackened masses of ruination if you gazed straight in
+at the interiors.  Once in a while one had been thrown flat.  Probably
+big guns operated here. In such a case there was an avalanche of broken
+masonry cascading out into the roadway.
+
+Midway of the mile-long avenue of utter waste which we now traversed we
+came on a sort of small square.  Here was the yellow village church.  It
+lacked a spire and a cross, and the front door was gone, so we could see
+the wrecked altar and the splintered pews within.  Flanking the church
+there had been a communal hall, which was now shapeless, irredeemable
+wreckage.  A public well had stood in the open space between church and
+hall, with a design of stone pillars about it.  The open mouth of the
+well we could see was choked with foul debris; but a shell had struck
+squarely among the pillars and they fell inward like wigwam poles,
+forming a crazy apex.  I remember distinctly two other things: a picture
+of an elderly man with whiskers--one of those smudged atrocities that
+are called in the States crayon portraits--hanging undamaged on the
+naked wall of what had been an upper bedroom; and a wayside shrine of
+the sort so common in the Catholic countries of Europe.  A shell had hit
+it a glancing blow, so that the little china figure of the Blessed
+Virgin lay in bits behind the small barred opening of the shrine.
+
+Of living creatures there was none.  Heretofore, in all the blasted
+towns I had visited, there was some human life stirring.  One could
+count on seeing one of the old women who are so numerous in these
+Belgian hamlets--more numerous, I think, than anywhere else on earth.
+In my mind I had learned to associate such a sight with at least one old
+woman--an incredibly old woman, with a back bent like a measuring
+worm's, and a cap on her scanty hair, and a face crosshatched with a
+million wrinkles--who would be pottering about at the back of some half-
+ruined house or maybe squatting in a desolated doorway staring at us
+with her rheumy, puckered eyes.  Or else there would be a hunchback--
+crooked spines being almost as common in parts of Belgium as goiters are
+in parts of Switzerland.  But Battice had become an empty tomb, and was
+as lonely and as silent as a tomb.  Its people--those who survived--had
+fled from it as from an abomination.
+
+Beyond Battice stood another village, called Herve; and Herve was
+Battice all over again, with variations.  At this place, during the
+first few hours of actual hostilities between the little country and the
+big one, the Belgians had tried to stem the inpouring German flood, as
+was proved by wrecks of barricades in the high street.  One barricade
+had been built of wagon bodies and the big iron hods of road-scrapers;
+the wrecks of these were still piled at the road's edge.  Yet there
+remained tangible proof of the German claim that they did not harry and
+burn indiscriminately, except in cases where the attack on them was by
+general concert.
+
+Here and there, on the principal street, in a row of ruins, stood a
+single house that was intact and undamaged.  It was plain enough to be
+seen that pains had been taken to spare it from the common fate of its
+neighbors.  Also, I glimpsed one short side street that had come out of
+the fiery visitation whole and unscathed, proving, if it proved
+anything, that even in their red heat the Germans had picked and chosen
+the fruit for the wine press of their vengeance.
+
+After Herve we encountered no more destruction by wholesale, but only
+destruction by piecemeal, until, nearing Liege, we passed what remained
+of the most northerly of the ring of fortresses that formed the city's
+defenses.  The conquerors had dismantled it and thrown down the guns, so
+that of the fort proper there was nothing except a low earthen wall,
+almost like a natural ridge in the earth.
+
+All about it was an entanglement of barbed wire; the strands were woven
+and interwoven, tangled and twined together, until they suggested
+nothing so much as a great patch of blackberry briers after the leaves
+have dropped from the vines in the fall of the year.  To take the works
+the Germans had to cut through these trochas.  It seemed impossible to
+believe human beings could penetrate them, especially when one was told
+that the Belgians charged some of the wires with high electricity, so
+that those of the advancing party who touched them were frightfully
+burned and fell, with their garments blazing, into the jagged wire
+brambles, and were held there until they died.
+
+Before the charge and the final hand-to-hand fight, however, there was
+shelling.  There was much shelling.  Shells from the German guns that
+fell short or overshot the mark descended in the fields, and for a mile
+round these fields were plowed as though hundreds of plowshares had
+sheared the sod this way and that, until hardly a blade of grass was
+left to grow in its ordained place.  Where shells had burst after they
+struck were holes in the earth five or six feet across and five or six
+feet deep.  Shells from the German guns and from the Belgian guns had
+made a most hideous hash of a cluster of small cottages flanking a small
+smelting plant which stood directly in the line of fire. Some of these
+houses--workmen's homes, I suppose they had been--were of frame,
+sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you
+could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow,
+had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden
+ribs showing below.  The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely
+and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted. One
+house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken
+windows and fissures in the roof--as though the whizzing shells had
+spared it deliberately.
+
+I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of
+front wall between the places where windows had been.  It rose in a
+ragged column to the line of the roof-rafters--only, of course, there
+was neither roof nor rafter now.  On the face of the column, as though
+done in a spirit of bitter irony, was posted a proclamation, signed by
+the burgomaster and the military commandant, calling on the vanished
+dwellers of this place to preserve their tranquillity.
+
+On the side of the fort away from the city, and in the direction whence
+we had come, a corporal's guard had established itself in a rent-asunder
+house in order to be out of the wet.  On the front of the house they had
+hung a captured Belgian bugler's uniform and a French dragoon's
+overcoat, which latter garment was probably a trophy brought back from
+the lower lines of fighting; it made you think of an old-clothes-man's
+shop.  The corporal came forth to look at our passes before permitting
+us to go on.  He was a dumpy, good-natured-looking Hanoverian with
+patchy saffron whiskers sprouting out on him.
+
+"Ach! yes," he said in answer to my conductor's question.  "Things are
+quiet enough here now; but on Monday"--that would be three days before--
+"we shot sixteen men here--rioters and civilians who fired on our
+troops, and one grave-robber--a dirty hound! They are yonder."
+
+He swung his arm; and following its swing we saw a mound of fresh-turned
+clay, perhaps twenty feet in length, which made a yellow streak against
+the green of a small inclosed pasture about a hundred yards away.  We
+saw many such mounds that day; and this one where the ignoble sixteen
+lay was the shortest of the lot.  Some mounds were fifty or sixty feet
+in length.  I presume there were distinguishing marks on the filled-up
+trenches where the German dead lay, but from the automobile we could
+make out none.
+
+As we started on again, after giving the little Hanoverian the last
+treasured copy of a paper we had managed to keep that long against
+continual importunity, a big Belgian dog, with a dragging tail and a
+sharp jackal nose, loped round from behind an undamaged cow barn which
+stood back of the riven shell of a house where the soldiers were
+quartered.  He had the air about him of looking for somebody or
+something.
+
+He stopped short, sniffing and whining, at sight of the gray coats
+bunched in the doorway; and then, running back a few yards, with his
+head all the time turned to watch the strangers, he sat on his haunches,
+stuck his pointed muzzle upward toward the sky and fetched a long,
+homesick howl from the bottom of his disconsolate canine soul. When we
+turned a bend in the road, to enter the first recognizable street of
+Liege, he was still hunkered down there in the rain.  He finished the
+picture; he keynoted it.  The composition of it--for me--was perfect
+now.
+
+I mean no levity when I say that Liege was well shaken before taken; but
+merely that the phrase is the apt one for use, because it better
+expresses the truth than any other I can think of.  Yet, considering
+what it went through, last month, Liege seemed to have emerged in better
+shape than one would have expected.
+
+Driving into the town I saw more houses with white flags--the emblem of
+complete surrender--fluttering from sill and coping, than houses bearing
+marks of the siege.  In the bombardment the shells mostly appeared to
+have passed above the town--which was natural enough, seeing that the
+principal Belgian forts stood on the hilltops westward of and
+overlooking the city; and the principal German batteries--at least,
+until the last day of fighting--were posted behind temporary defenses,
+hastily thrown up, well to the east and north.
+
+Liege, squatted in the natural amphitheater below, practically escaped
+the fire of the big guns.  The main concern of the noncombatants, they
+tell me, was to shelter themselves from the street fighting, which, by
+all accounts, was both stubborn and sanguinary.  The doughty Walloons
+who live in this corner of Belgium have had the name of being sincere
+and willing workers with bare steel since the days when Charles the
+Bold, of Burgundy, sought to curb their rebellious spirits by razing
+their city walls and massacring some ten thousand of them.  And quite a
+spell before that, I believe, Julius Caesar found them tough to bend and
+hard to break.
+
+As for the Germans, checked as they had been in their rush on France by
+a foe whom they had regarded as too puny to count as a factor in the
+war, they sacrificed themselves by hundreds and thousands to win
+breathing space behind standing walls until their great seventeen-inch
+siege guns could be brought from Essen and mounted by the force of
+engineers who came for that purpose direct from the Krupp works.
+
+In that portion of the town lying west of the Meuse we counted perhaps
+ten houses that were leveled flat and perhaps twenty that were now but
+burnt-out, riddled hulls of houses, as empty and useless as so many
+shucked pea-pods.  Of the bridges spanning the river, the principal one,
+a handsome four-span structure of stone ornamented with stone figures of
+river gods, lay now in shattered fragments, choking the current, where
+the Belgians themselves had blown it apart.  One more bridge, or perhaps
+two--I cannot be sure--were closed to traffic because dynamite had made
+them unsafe; but the remaining bridges, of which I think there were
+three, showed no signs of rough treatment.  Opposite the great
+University there was a big, black, ragged scar to show where a block of
+dwellings had stood.
+
+Liege, to judge from its surface aspect, could not well have been
+quieter.  Business went on; buyers and sellers filled the side streets
+and dotted the long stone quays.  Old Flemish men fished industriously
+below the wrecked stone bridge, where the debris made new eddies in the
+swift, narrow stream; and blue pigeons swarmed in the plaza before the
+Palais de Justice, giving to the scene a suggestion of St. Mark's Square
+at Venice.
+
+The German Landwehr, who were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants
+civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against
+the Germans.  But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble
+was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us.  We talked
+with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been
+a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper.  He received us beneath the
+portico of the Theatre Royale, built after the model of the Odeon in
+Paris.  Two waspish rapid-fire guns stood just within the shelter of the
+columns, with their black snouts pointing this way and that to command
+the sweep of the three-cornered Place du Theatre.  A company of soldiers
+was quartered in the theater itself.  At night, so the lieutenant said,
+those men who were off duty rummaged the costumes out of the dressing
+rooms, put them on, and gave mock plays, with music.  An officer's horse
+occupied what I think must have been the box office.  It put its head
+out of a little window just over our heads and nickered when other
+horses passed.  Against the side of the building were posters
+advertising a French company to play the Gallicized version of an
+American farce--"Baby Mine"--by Margaret Mayo.  The borders of the
+posters were ornamented with prints of American flags done in the proper
+colors.
+
+"Yes, Liege seems quiet enough," said the lieutenant; "but we expect a
+revolt to break out at any time.  We expected it last night, and the
+guard in the streets was tripled and doubled; and these little dears"--
+patting the muzzle of one of the machine guns--"were put here; and more
+like them were mounted on the porticoes of the Hotel de Ville and the
+Palais de Justice.  So nothing happened in the city proper, though in
+the outskirts three soldiers disappeared and are supposed to have been
+murdered, and a high officer"--he did not give the name or the rank--
+"was waylaid and killed just beyond the environs.
+
+"Now we fear that the uprising may come to-night.  For the last three
+days the residents, in great numbers, have been asking for permits to
+leave Liege and go into neutral territory in Holland, or to other parts
+of their own country.  To us this sudden exodus--there seems to be no
+reason for it--looks significant.
+
+"These people are naturally turbulent.  Always they have been so.  Most
+of them are makers of parts for firearms--gunmaking, you know, was the
+principal industry here--and they are familiar with weapons; and many of
+the men are excellent shots.  This increases the danger.  At first they
+were content to ambush single soldiers who strayed into obscure quarters
+after dark.  Now it is forbidden for less than three soldiers in a party
+to go anywhere at night; and they think from this that we are afraid,
+and are growing more daring.
+
+"By day they smile at us and bow, and are as polite as dancing masters;
+but at night the same men who smile at us will cheerfully cut the throat
+of any German who is foolish enough to venture abroad alone.
+
+"Besides, this town and all the towns between here and Brussels are
+being secretly flooded with papers printed in French telling the people
+that we have been beaten everywhere to the south, and that the Allies
+are but a few miles away; and that if they will rise in numbers and
+destroy the garrisons re-enforcements will arrive the next morning to
+hold the district against us.
+
+"If they do rise it will be Louvain all over again.  We shall burn Liege
+and kill all who are suspected of being in league against our troops.
+Assuredly many innocent ones will suffer then with the guilty; but what
+else can we do? We are living above a seething volcano."
+
+Certainly, though, never did volcano seethe more quietly.
+
+The garrison commander would not hear of our visiting any of the wrecked
+Belgian fortresses on the wooded heights behind the city.  As a reason
+for his refusal he said that explosives in the buried magazines were
+beginning to go off, making it highly dangerous for spectators to
+venture near them.  However, he had no objection to our going to a
+certain specified point within the zone of supposed safety.  With a
+noncommissioned officer to guide us we climbed up a miry footpath to the
+crest of a low hill; and from a distance of perhaps a hundred yards we
+looked across at what was left of Fort Loncin, one of the principal
+defenses.
+
+I am wrong there.  We did not look at what was left of Fort Loncin.
+Literally nothing was left of it.  As a fort it was gone, obliterated,
+wiped out, vanished.  It had been of a triangular shape.  It was of no
+shape now.  We found it difficult to believe that the work of human
+hands had wrought destruction so utter and overwhelming.  Where masonry
+walls had been was a vast junk heap; where stout magazines had been
+bedded down in hard concrete was a crater; where strong barracks had
+stood was a jumbled, shuffled nothingness.
+
+Standing there on the shell-torn hilltop, looking across to where the
+Krupp surprise wrote its own testimonials at its first time of using, in
+characters so deadly and devastating, I found myself somehow thinking of
+that foolish nursery tale wherein it is recited that a pig built himself
+a house of straw, and the wolf came; and he huffed and he puffed and he
+blew the house down.  The noncommissioned officer told us an unknown
+number of the defenders, running probably into the hundreds, had been
+buried so deeply beneath the ruins of the fort in the last hours of the
+fighting that the Germans had been unable to recover the bodies.  Even
+as he spoke a puff of wind brought to our nostrils a smell which, once a
+man gets it into his nose, he will never get the memory of it out again
+so long as he has a nose.  Being sufficiently sick, we departed thence.
+
+As we rode back, and had got as far as the two ruined villages, it began
+to rain very hard.  The rain, as it splashed into the puddles, stippled
+the farther reaches of the road thickly with dots, and its slanting
+lines turned everything into one gray etching which you might have
+labeled Desolation! And you would make no mistake in your labeling.
+Then--with one of those tricks of deliberate drama by which Nature
+sometimes shames stage managers--the late afternoon sun came out just
+after we crossed the frontier, and shone on us; and on the dapper young
+officers driving out in carriages; and on the peaceful German country
+places with their formal gardens; and on a crate of fat white German
+pigs riding to market to be made up into sausages for the placid
+burghers of Aix-la-Chapelle.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 8
+
+Three Generals and a Cook
+
+
+To get to the civic midriff of the ancient and honorable French city of
+Laon you must ascend a road that winds in spirals about a high, steep
+hill, like threads cut in a screw. Doing this you come at length to the
+flat top of the screw--a most curiously flat top--and find on this side
+of you the Cathedral and the market-place, and on that side of you the
+Hotel de Ville, where a German flag hangs among the iron lilies in the
+grille-worked arms of the Republic above the front doors.  Dead ahead of
+you is the Prefecture, which is a noble stone building, facing southward
+toward the River Aisne; and it has decorations of the twentieth century,
+a gateway of the thirteenth century and plumbing of the third century,
+when there was no plumbing to speak of.
+
+We had made this journey and now the hour was seven in the evening, and
+we were dining in the big hall of the Prefecture as the guests of His
+Excellency, Field Marshal von Heeringen, commanding the Seventh Army of
+the German Kaiser--dining, I might add, from fine French plates, with
+smart German orderlies for waiters.
+
+Except us five, and one other, the twenty-odd who sat about the great
+oblong table were members of the Over-General's staff.  We five were
+Robert J.  Thompson, American consul at Aix-la-Chapelle; McCutcheon and
+Bennett, of the Chicago Tribune; Captain Alfred Mannesmann, of the
+great German manufacturing firm of Mannesmann Mulag; and myself.  The
+one other was a Berlin artist, by name Follbehr, who having the run of
+the army, was going out daily to do quick studies in water colors in the
+trenches and among the batteries.  He did them remarkably well, too,
+seeing that any minute a shell might come and spatter him all over his
+own drawing board.  All the rest, though, were generals and colonels and
+majors, and such--youngish men mostly.  Excluding our host I do not
+believe there was a man present who had passed fifty years of age; but
+the General was nearer eighty than fifty, being one of the veterans of
+the Franco-Prussian War, whom their Emperor had ordered out of desk jobs
+in the first days of August to shepherd his forces in the field.  At his
+call they came--Von Heeringen and Von Hindenberg and Von Zwehl, to
+mention three names that speedily became catchwords round the world--
+with their gray heads full of Prussian war tactics; and very soon their
+works had justified the act of their imperial master in choosing them
+for leadership, and now they had new medals at their throats and on
+their breasts to overlay the old medals they won back in 1870-71.
+
+Like many of the older officers of the German Army I met, Von Heeringen
+spoke no English, in which regard he was excessively unlike ninety per
+cent of the younger officers.  Among them it was an uncommon thing in my
+experience to find one who did not know at least a smattering of English
+and considerably more than a smattering of understandable French.  Even
+that marvelous organism, the German private soldier, was apt to astonish
+you at unexpected moments by answering in fair-enough English the
+questions you put to him in fractured and dislocated German.
+
+Not once or twice, but a hundred times during my cruising about in
+Belgium and Germany and France, I laboriously unloaded a string of
+crippled German nouns and broken-legged adjectives and unsocketed verbs
+on a hickory-looking sentry, only to have him reply to me in my own
+tongue.  It would come out then that he had been a waiter at a British
+seaside resort or a steward on a Hamburg-American liner; or, oftener
+still, that he had studied English at the public schools in his native
+town of Kiel, or Coblenz, or Dresden, or somewhere.
+
+The officers' English, as I said before, was nearly always ready and
+lubricant.  To one who spoke no French and not enough German to hurt
+him, this proficiency in language on the part of the German standing
+army was a precious boon.  The ordinary double-barreled dictionary of
+phrases had already disclosed itself as a most unsatisfying volume in
+which to put one's trust. It was wearing on the disposition to turn the
+leaves trying to find out how to ask somebody to pass the butter and
+find instead whole pages of parallel columns of translated sentences
+given over to such questions as "Where is the aunt of my stepfather's
+second cousin?"
+
+As a rule a man does not go to Europe in time of war to look up his
+relatives by marriage.  He may even have gone there to avoid them.  War
+is terrible enough without lugging in all the remote kinsfolk a fellow
+has.  How much easier, then, to throw oneself on the superior
+educational qualifications of the German military machine.  Somebody was
+sure to have a linguistic life net there, rigged and ready for you to
+drop into.
+
+It was so in this instance, as it has been so in many instances before
+and since.  The courteous gentlemen who sat at my right side and at my
+left spoke in German or French or English as the occasion suited, while
+old Von Heeringen boomed away in rumbling German phrases.  As I ate I
+studied him.
+
+Three weeks later, less a day, I met by appointment Lord Kitchener and
+spent forty minutes, or thereabouts, in his company at the War Office in
+London.  In the midst of the interview, as I sat facing Kitchener I
+began wondering, in the back part of my head, who it was Lord Kitchener
+reminded me of.  Suddenly the answer came to me, and it jolted me.  The
+answer was Von Heeringen.
+
+Physically the two men--Kitchener of Khartoum and Von Heeringen, the
+Gray Ghost of Metz--had nothing in common; mentally I conceived them to
+be unlike.  Except that both of them held the rank of field marshal, I
+could put my finger on no point of similarity, either in personality or
+in record, which these men shared between them.  It is true they both
+served in the war of 1870-71; but at the outset this parallel fell flat,
+too, because one had been a junior officer on the German side and the
+other a volunteer on the French side.  One was a Prussian in every
+outward aspect; the other was as British as it is possible for a Briton
+to be.  One had been at the head of the general staff of his country,
+and was now in the field in active service with a sword at his side.
+The other, having served his country in the field for many years, now
+sat intrenched behind a roll-top desk, directing the machinery of the
+War Office, with a pencil for a baton.  Kitchener was in his robust
+sixties, with a breast like a barrel; Von Heeringen was in his
+shrinking, drying-up seventies, and his broad shoulders had already
+begun to fold in on his ribs and his big black eyes to retreat deeper
+into his skull.  One was beaky-nosed, hatchet-headed, bearded; the other
+was broad-faced and shaggily mustached.  One had been famed for his
+accessibility; the other for his inaccessibility.
+
+So, because of these acutely dissimilar things, I marveled to myself
+that day in London why, when I looked at Kitchener, I should think of
+Von Heeringen.  In another minute, though, I knew why: Both men radiated
+the same quality of masterfulness; both of them physically typified
+competency; both of them looked on the world with the eyes of men who
+are born to have power and to hold dominion over lesser men.  Put either
+of these two in the rags of a beggar or the motley of a Pantaloon, and
+at a glance you would know him for a leader.  Considering that we were
+supposed to be at the front on this evening at Laon, the food was good,
+there being a soup, and the invariable veal on which a German buttresses
+the solid foundations of his dinner, a salad and fruit, red wine and
+white wine and brandy.  Also, there were flies amounting in numbers to a
+great multitude.  The talk, like the flies, went to and fro about the
+table; and always it was worth hearing, since it dealt largely with
+first-hand experiences in the very heart of the fighting.
+
+Yet I must add that not all the talk was talk of war.  In peaceful Aix-
+la-Chapelle, whence we had come, the people knew but one topic.  Here,
+on the forward frayed edge of the battle line, the men who had that day
+played their part in battle occasionally spoke of other things.  I
+recall there was a discussion between Captain von Theobald, of the
+Artillery, and Major Humplmayer, of the Automobile Corps, on the merits
+of a painting that filled one of the panels in the big, handsome,
+overdecorated hall.  The major won, which was natural enough, since, in
+time of peace, he was by way of being a collector of and dealer in art
+objects at Munich.  Somebody else mentioned big-game shooting.  For five
+minutes, then, or such a matter, the ways of big game and the ways of
+shooting it held the interest of half a dozen men at our curve of the
+table.
+
+In such an interlude as this the listener might almost have lulled
+himself into the fancy that, after all, there was no war; that these
+courteous, gray-coated, shoulder-strapped gentlemen were not at present
+engaged in the business of killing their fellowmen; that this building
+wherein we sat, with its florid velvet carpets underfoot and its
+too-heavy chandeliers overhead, was not the captured chateau of the
+governor of a French province; and that the deep-eyed, white-fleeced,
+bull-voiced old man who sat just opposite was not the commander of
+sundry hundreds of thousands of fighting men with guns in their hands,
+but surely was no more and no less than the elderly lord of the manor,
+who, having a fancy for regimentals, had put on his and had pinned some
+glittering baubles on his coat and then had invited a few of his friends
+and neighbors in for a simple dinner on this fine evening of the young
+autumn.
+
+Yet we knew that already the war had taken toll of nearly every man in
+uniform who was present about this board.  General von Heeringen's two
+sons, both desperately wounded, were lying in field hospitals--one in
+East Prussia, the other in northern France not many miles from where we
+were.  His second in command had two sons--his only two sons--killed in
+the same battle three weeks before.  When, a few minutes earlier, I had
+heard this I stared at him, curious to see what marks so hard a stroke
+would leave on a man.  I saw only a grave middle-aged gentleman, very
+attentive to the consul who sat beside him, and very polite to us all.
+
+Prince Scharmberg-Lippe, whom we had passed driving away from the
+Prefecture in his automobile as we drove to it in ours, was the last of
+four brothers.  The other three were killed in the first six weeks of
+fighting.  Our own companion, Captain Mannesmann, heard only the day
+before, when we stopped at Hirson--just over the border from Belgium--
+that his cousin had won the Iron Cross for conspicuous courage, and
+within three days more was to hear that this same cousin had been sniped
+from ambush during a night raid down the left wing.
+
+Nor had death been overly stingy to the members of the Staff itself.  We
+gathered as much from chance remarks.  And so, as it came to be eight
+o'clock, I caught myself watching certain vacant chairs at our table and
+at the two smaller tables in the next room with a strained curiosity.
+
+One by one the vacant chairs filled up.  At intervals the door behind me
+would open and an officer would clank in, dusted over with the sift of
+the French roads.  He would bow ceremoniously to his chief and then to
+the company generally, slip into an unoccupied chair, give an order over
+his shoulder to a soldier-waiter, and at once begin to eat his dinner
+with the air of a man who has earned it.  After a while there was but
+one place vacant at our table; it was next to me.  I could not keep my
+eyes away from it.  It got on my nerves--that little gap in the circle;
+that little space of white linen, bare of anything but two unfilled
+glasses.  To me it became as portentous as an unscrewed coffin lid.  No
+one else seemed to notice it.  Cigars had been passed round and the talk
+eddied casually back and forth with the twisty smoke wreaths.
+
+An orderly drew the empty chair back with a thump.  I think I jumped.  A
+slender man, whose uniform fitted him as though it had been his skin,
+was sitting down beside me. Unlike those who came before him, he had
+entered so quietly that I had not sensed his coming.  I heard the
+soldier call him Excellency; and I heard him tell the soldier not to
+give him any soup.  We swapped commonplaces, I telling him what my
+business there was; and for a little while he plied his knife and fork
+busily, making the heavy gold curb chain on his left wrist tinkle
+musically.
+
+"I'm rather glad they did not get me this afternoon," he said as though
+to make conversation with a stranger.  "This is first-rate veal--better
+than we usually have here."
+
+"Get you?" I said.  "Who wanted to get you?"
+
+"Our friends, the enemy," he answered.  "I was in one of our trenches
+rather well toward the front, and a shell or two struck just behind me.
+I think, from their sound, they were French shells."
+
+This debonair gentleman, as presently transpired, was Colonel von
+Scheller, for four years consul to the German Embassy at Washington,
+more lately minister for foreign affairs of the kingdom of Saxony, and
+now doing staff duty in the ordnance department here at the German
+center.  He had the sharp brown eyes of a courageous fox terrier, a
+mustache that turned up at the ends, and a most beautiful command of the
+English language and its American idioms.  He hurried along with his
+dinner and soon he had caught up with us.
+
+"I suggest," he said, "that we go out on the terrace to drink our
+coffee.  It is about time for the French to start their evening
+benediction, as we call it.  They usually quit firing their heavy guns
+just before dark, and usually begin again at eight and keep it up for an
+hour or two."
+
+So we two took our coffee cups and our cigars in our hands and went out
+through a side passage to the terrace, and sat on a little iron bench,
+where a shaft of light, from a window of the room we had just quit,
+showed a narrow streak of flowering plants beyond the bricked wall and a
+clump of red and yellow woodbine on a low wall.
+
+The rest lay in blackness; but I knew, from what I had seen before dusk
+came, that we must be somewhere near the middle of a broad terrace--a
+hanging garden rather--full of sundials and statues and flower beds,
+which overhung the southern face of the Hill of Laon, and from which, in
+daylight, a splendid view might be had of wooded slopes falling away
+into wide, flat valleys, and wide, flat valleys rising again to form
+more wooded slopes.  I knew, too, from what I remembered, that the
+plateau immediately beneath us was flyspecked with the roofs of small
+abandoned villages; and that the road which ran straight from the base
+of the heights toward the remote river was a-crawl with supply wagons
+and ammunition wagons going forward to the German batteries, seven miles
+away, and with scouts and messengers in automobiles and on motor cycles,
+and the day's toll of wounded in ambulances coming back from the front.
+
+We could not see them when we went to the parapet and looked downward
+into the black gulf below, but the rumbling of the wheels and the
+panting of the motors came up to us.  With these came, also, the remote
+music of those queer little trumpets carried by the soldiers who ride
+beside the drivers of German military automobiles; and this sounded as
+thinly and plaintively to our ears as the cries of sandpipers heard a
+long way off across a windy beach.
+
+We could hear something else too: the evening benediction had started.
+Now fast, now slow, like the beating of a feverish pulse, the guns
+sounded in faint throbs; and all along the horizon from southeast to
+southwest, and back again, ran flares and waves of a sullen red
+radiance.  The light flamed high at one instant--like fireworks--and at
+the next it died almost to a glow, as though a great bed of peat coals
+or a vast limekiln lay on the farthermost crest of the next chain of
+hills.  It was the first time I had ever seen artillery fire at night,
+though I had heard it often enough by then in France and in Belgium, and
+even in Germany; for when the wind blew out of the west we could hear in
+Aix-la-Chapelle the faint booming of the great cannons before Antwerp,
+days and nights on end.
+
+I do not know how long I stood and looked and listened.  Eventually I
+was aware that the courteous Von Scheller, standing at my elbow, was
+repeating something he had already stated at least once.
+
+"Those brighter flashes you see, apparently coming from below the other
+lights, are our guns," he was saying.  "They seem to be below the others
+because they are nearer to us.  Personally I don't think these evening
+volleys do very much damage," he went on as though vaguely regretful
+that the dole of death by night should be so scanty, "because it is
+impossible for the men in the outermost observation pits to see the
+effect of the shots; but we answer, as you notice, just to show the
+French and English we are not asleep."
+
+Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.
+When they were ended we went indoors.  Everybody was assembled in the
+long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smashing out
+marching songs on the piano.  The Berlin artist made an art gallery of
+the billiard table and was exhibiting the water-color sketches he had
+done that day--all very dashing and spirited in their treatment, though
+a bit splashy and scrambled-eggish as to the use of the pigments.
+
+A very young man, with the markings of a captain on shoulder and collar,
+came in and went up to General von Heeringen and showed him something--
+something that looked like a very large and rather ornamental steel coal
+scuttle which had suffered from a serious personal misunderstanding with
+an ax.  The elongated top of it, which had a fluted, rudder-like
+adornment, made you think of Siegfried's helmet in the opera; but the
+bottom, which was squashed out of shape, made you think of a total loss.
+
+When the general had finished looking at this object we all had a chance
+to finger it.  The young captain seemed quite proud of it and bore it
+off with him to the dining room.  It was what remained of a bomb, and
+had been loaded with slugs of lead and those iron cherries that are
+called shrapnel.  A French flyer had dropped it that afternoon with
+intent to destroy one of the German captive balloons and its operator.
+The young officer was the operator of the balloon in question.  It was
+his daily duty to go aloft, at the end of a steel tether, and bob about
+for seven hours at a stretch, studying the effects of the shell fire and
+telephoning down directions for the proper aiming of the guns.  He had
+been up seven hundred feet in the air that afternoon, with no place to
+go in case of accident, when the Frenchman came over and tried to hit
+him.  "It struck within a hundred meters of me," called back the young
+captain as he disappeared through the dining-room doorway.  "Made quite
+a noise and tore up the earth considerably."
+
+"He was lucky--the young Herr Captain," said Von Scheller--"luckier than
+his predecessor.  A fortnight ago one of the enemy's flyers struck one
+of our balloons with a bomb and the gas envelope exploded.  When the
+wreckage reached the earth there was nothing much left of the operator--
+poor fellow!--except the melted buttons on his coat.  There are very few
+safe jobs in this army, but being a captive-balloon observer is one of
+the least safe of them all."
+
+I had noted that the young captain wore in the second buttonhole of his
+tunic the black-and-white-striped ribbon and the black-and-white Maltese
+Cross; and now when I looked about me I saw that at least every third
+man of the present company likewise bore such a decoration.  I knew the
+Iron Cross was given to a man only for gallant conduct in time of war at
+the peril of his life.
+
+A desire to know a few details beset me.  Humplmayer, the scholarly art
+dealer, was at my side.  He had it too--the Iron Cross of the first
+class.
+
+"You won that lately?" I began, touching the ribbon.
+
+"Yes," he said; "only the other day I received it."
+
+"And for what, might I ask?" said I, pressing my advantage.
+
+"Oh," he said, "I've been out quite a bit in the night air lately.  You
+know we Germans are desperately afraid of night air."
+
+Later I learned--though not from Humplmayer--that he had for a period of
+weeks done scout work in an automobile in hostile territory; which meant
+that he rode in the darkness over the strange roads of an alien country,
+exposed every minute to the chances of ambuscade and barbed-wire
+mantraps and the like.  I judge he earned his bauble.
+
+I tried Von Theobald next--a lynx-faced, square-shouldered young man of
+the field guns.  To him I put the question: "What have you done, now, to
+merit the bestowal of the Cross?"
+
+"Well," he said--and his smile was born of embarrassment, I thought--
+"there was shooting once or twice, and I--well, I did not go away.  I
+remained."
+
+So after that I quit asking.  But it was borne in upon me that if these
+gold-braceletted, monocled, wasp-waisted exquisites could go jauntily
+forth for flirtations with death as afore-time I had seen them going,
+then also they could be marvelously modest touching on their own
+performances in the event of their surviving those most fatal
+blandishments.
+
+Pretty soon we told the Staff good night, according to the ritualistic
+Teutonic fashion, and took ourselves off to bed; for the next day was
+expected to be a full day, which it was indeed and verily.  In the
+hotels of the town, such as they were, officers were billeted, four to
+the room and two to the bed; but the commandant enthroned at the Hotel
+de Ville looked after our comfort.  He sent a soldier to nail a notice
+on the gate of one of the handsomest houses in Laon--a house whence the
+tenants had fled at the coming of the Germans--which notice gave warning
+to all whom it might concern that Captain Mannesmann, who carried the
+Kaiser's own pass, and four American Herren were, until further orders,
+domiciled there.  And the soldier tarried to clean our boots while we
+slept and bring us warm shaving water in the morning.
+
+Being thus provided for we tramped away through the empty winding
+streets to Number Five, Rue St. Cyr, which was a big, fine three-story
+mansion with its own garden and courtyard.  Arriving there we drew lots
+for bedrooms.  It fell to me to occupy one that evidently belonged to
+the master of the house.  He must have run away in a hurry.  His
+bathrobe still hung on a peg; his other pair of suspenders dangled over
+the footboard; and his shaving brush, with dried lather on it, was on
+the floor.  I stepped on it as I got into bed and hurt my foot.
+
+Goodness knows I was tired enough, but I lay awake a while thinking what
+changes in our journalistic fortunes thirty days had brought us.  Five
+weeks before, bearing dangerously dubious credentials, we had trailed
+afoot--a suspicious squad--at the tail of the German columns, liable to
+be halted and locked up any minute by any fingerling of a sublieutenant
+who might be so minded to so serve us.  In that stressful time a war
+correspondent was almost as popular, with the officialdom of the German
+army, as the Asiatic cholera would have been.  The privates were our
+best friends then. Just one month, to the hour and the night, after we
+slept on straw as quasi-prisoners and under an armed guard in a
+schoolhouse belonging to the Prince de Caraman-Chimay, at Beaumont, we
+dined with the commandant of a German garrison in the castle of another
+prince of the same name--the Prince de Chimay--at the town of Chimay,
+set among the timbered preserves of the ancient house of Chimay.  In
+Belgium, at the end of August, we fended and foraged for ourselves
+aboard a train of wounded and prisoners.
+
+In northern France, at the end of September, Prince Reuss, German
+minister to Persia, but serving temporarily in the Red Cross Corps, had
+bestirred himself to find lodgings for us.  And now, thanks to a newborn
+desire on the part of the Berlin War Office to let the press of America
+know something of the effects of their operations on the people of the
+invaded states, here we were, making free with a strange French
+gentleman's chateau and messing with an Over-General's Staff.  Lying
+there, in another man's bed, I felt like a burglar and I slept like an
+oyster--the oyster being, as naturalists know, a most sound sleeper.
+
+In the morning there was breakfast at the great table--the flies of the
+night before being still present--with General von Heeringen inquiring
+most earnestly as to how we had rested, and then going out to see to the
+day's killing.  Before doing so, however, he detailed the competent
+Captain von Theobald and the efficient Lieutenant Giebel to serve for
+the day as our guides while we studied briefly the workings of the
+German war machine in the actual theater of war.
+
+It was under their conductorship that about noon we aimed our
+automobiles for the spot where, in accordance with provisions worked out
+in advance, but until that moment unknown to us, we were to lunch with
+another general--Von Zwehl, of the reserves. We left the hill, where the
+town was, some four miles behind us, and when we had passed through two
+wrecked and silent villages and through three of those strips of park
+timber which Continentals call forests, we presently drew up and halted
+and dismounted where a thick fringe of undergrowth, following the line
+of an old and straggly thorn hedge, met the road at right angles on the
+comb of a small ridge commanding a view of the tablelands to the
+southward.
+
+As we climbed up the banks we were aware of certain shelters which were
+like overgrown rabbit hutches cunningly contrived of wattled faggots and
+straw sheaves plaited together.  They had tarpaulin interlinings and
+dug-out earthen floors covered over thickly with straw.  These cozy
+small shacks hid themselves behind a screen of haws among the scattered
+trees which flanked an ancient fortification, abandoned many years
+before, I judged, by the grass-grown looks of it.  Out in front, upon
+the open crest of the rise, staff officers were grouped about two
+telescopes mounted on tripods.  An old man--you could tell by the hunch
+of his shoulders he was old--sat on a camp chair with his back to us and
+his face against the barrels of one of the telescopes.  With his long
+dust-colored coat and the lacings of violent scarlet upon his cap and
+his upturned collar he made you think of one of those big gray African
+parrots that talk so fluently and bite so viciously.  But when, getting
+nimbly up, he turned to greet us and be introduced the resemblance
+vanished.
+
+There was nothing of the parrot about him now, Here was a man part watch
+dog and part hawk.  His cheeks and the flanges of his nostrils were
+thickly hair-lined with those little red-and-blue veins that are to be
+found in the texture of good American paper currency and in the faces of
+elderly men who have lived much out-of-doors during their lives.  His
+jowls were heavy and pendulous like a mastiff's.  His frontal bone came
+down low and straight so that under the flat arch of the brow his small,
+very bright agate-blue eyes looked out as from beneath half-closed
+shutters.  His hair was clipped close to his scalp and the shape of his
+skull showed, rounded and bulgy; not the skull of a thinker, nor yet the
+skull of a creator, just the skull of a natural-born fighting man.  The
+big, ridgy veins in the back of his neck stood out like window-cords
+from a close smocking of fine wrinkles.  The neck itself was tanned to a
+brickdust red.  A gnawed white mustache bristled on his upper lip.  He
+was tall without seeming to be tall and broad without appearing broad,
+and he was old enough for a grandfather and spry enough for his own
+grandchild.  You know the type.  Our Civil War produced it in number.
+
+At his throat was the blue star of the Order of Merit, the very highest
+honor a German soldier can win, and below it on his breast the
+inevitable black-and-white striped ribbon. The one meant leadership and
+the other testified to individual valor in the teeth of danger.  It was
+Excellency von Zwehl, commander of the Seventh Reserve Corps of the
+Western Army, the man who took Maubeuge from the French and English, and
+the man who in the same week held the imperiled German center against
+the French and English.
+
+We lunched with the General and his staff on soup and sausages, with a
+rare and precious Belgian melon cut in thin, salmon-tinted crescents to
+follow for dessert.  But before the lunch he took us and showed us,
+pointing this way and that with his little riding whip, the theater
+wherein he had done a thing which he valued more than the taking of a
+walled city.  Indeed there was a certain elemental boy-like bearing of
+pride in him as he told us the story.  If I am right in my dates the
+defenses of Maubeuge caved in under the batterings of the German Jack
+Johnsons on September sixth and the citadel surrendered September
+seventh.  On the following day, the eighth, Von Zwehl got word that a
+sudden forward thrust of the Allies threatened the German center at
+Laon.  Without waiting for orders he started to the relief.  He had
+available only nine thousand troops, all reserves.  As many more shortly
+re-enforced him.  He marched this small army--small, that is, as armies
+go these Titan times--for four days and three nights.  In the last
+twenty-four hours of marching the eighteen thousand covered more than
+forty English miles--in the rain.  They came on this same plateau, the
+one which we now faced, at six o'clock of the morning of September
+thirteenth, and within an hour were engaged against double or triple
+their number.  Von Zwehl held off the enemy until a strengthening force
+reached him, and then for three days, with his face to the river and his
+back to the hill, he fought.
+
+Out of a total force of forty thousand men he lost eight thousand and
+more in killed and wounded, but he saved the German Army from being
+split asunder between its shoulder-blades.  The enemy in proportion lost
+even more than he did, he thought.  The General had no English; he told
+us all this in German, Von Theobald standing handily by to translate for
+him when our own scanty acquaintance with the language left us puzzled.
+
+"We punished them well and they punished us well," he added.  "We
+captured a group of thirty-one Scotchmen--all who were left out of a
+battalion of six hundred and fifty, and there was no commissioned
+officer left of that battalion.  A sergeant surrendered them to my men.
+They fight very well against us--the Scotch."
+
+Since then the groundswell of battle had swept forward, then backward,
+until now, as chance would have it, General von Zwehl once more had his
+headquarters on the identical spot where he had them four weeks before
+during his struggle to keep the German center from being pierced.  Then
+it had been mainly infantry fighting at close range; now it was the
+labored pounding of heavy guns, the pushing ahead of trench-work
+preparatory to another pitched battle.
+
+Considering what had taken place here less than a month before the plain
+immediately before us seemed peaceful enough.
+
+Nature certainly works mighty fast to cover up what man at war does.
+True, the yellow-green meadowlands ahead of us were scuffed and scored
+minutely as though a myriad swine had rooted there for mast. The gouges
+of wheels and feet were at the roadside. Under the broken hedge-rows you
+saw a littering of weather-beaten French knapsacks and mired uniform
+coats, but that was all.  New grass was springing up in the hoof tracks,
+and in a pecking, puny sort of way an effort was being made by certain
+French peasants within sight to get back to work in their wasted truck
+patches.  Near at hand I counted three men and an old woman in the
+fields, bent over like worms.  On the crest above them stood this gray
+veteran of two invasions of their land, aiming with his riding whip. The
+whip, I believe, signifies dominion, and sometimes brute force.
+
+Beyond the tableland, and along the succession of gentle elevations
+which ringed it in to the south, the pounding of the field pieces went
+steadily on, while Von Zwehl lectured to us upon the congenial subject
+of what he here had done.  Out yonder a matter of three or four English
+miles from us the big ones were busy for a fact.  We could see the smoke
+clouds of each descending shell and the dust clouds of the explosion,
+and of course we could hear it.  It never stopped for an instant, never
+abated for so much as a minute.  It had been going on this way for
+weeks; it would surely go on this way for weeks yet to come.  But so far
+as we could discern the General paid it no heed--he nor any of his
+staff.  It was his business, but seemingly the business went well.
+
+It was late that afternoon when we met our third general, and this
+meeting was quite by chance.  Coming back from a spin down the lines we
+stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur,
+known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve
+or something.  A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who
+we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of
+the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced
+in due form to General d'Elsa, the head of the Twelfth Reserve Corps, it
+turned out.  Standing in a ceremonious ring, with filled glasses in our
+hands, about a table which bore a flary lamp and a bottle of bad native
+wine, we toasted him and he toasted us.
+
+He was younger by ten years, I should say, than either Von Heeringen or
+Von Zwehl; too young, I judged, to have got his training in the blood-
+and-iron school of Bismarck and Von Moltke of which the other two must
+have been brag-scholars.  Both of them, I think, were Prussians, but
+this general was a Saxon from the South.  Indeed, as I now recall, he
+said his home in peace times was in Dresden.  He seemed less simple of
+manner than they; they in turn lacked a certain flexibility and grace of
+bearing which were his.  But two things in common they all three had and
+radiated from them--a superb efficiency in the trade at which they
+worked and a superb confidence in the tools with which they did the
+work.  This was rather a small man, quick and supple in his movements.
+He had a limited command of English, and he appeared deeply desirous
+that we Americans should have a good opinion of the behavior of his
+troops and that we should say as much in what we wrote for our fellow
+Americans to read.
+
+Coming out of the house to reenter our automobile I saw, across the
+small square of the town, which by now was quite in darkness, the flare
+of a camp kitchen.  I wanted very much to examine one of these wheeled
+cook wagons at close range.  An officer--the same who had first
+approached us to examine our papers--accompanied me to explain its
+workings and to point out the various compartments where the coal was
+kept and the fuel, and the two big sunken pots where the stew was cooked
+and the coffee was brewed.  The thing proved to be cumbersome, which was
+German, but it was most complete in detail, and that, take it, was
+German too.  While the officer rattled the steel lids the cook himself
+stood rigidly alongside, with his fingers touching the seams of his
+trousers.  Seen by the glare of his own fire he seemed a clod, fit only
+to make soups and feed a fire box.  But by that same flickery light I
+saw something.  On the breast of his grease-spattered blouse dangled a
+black-and-white ribbon with a black-and-white Maltese cross fastened to
+it.  I marveled that a company cook should wear the Iron Cross of the
+second class and I asked the captain about it.  He laughed at the wonder
+that was evident in my tones.
+
+"If you will look more closely," he said, "you will see that a good many
+of our cooks already have won the Iron Cross since this war began, and a
+good many others will yet win it--if they live.  We have no braver men
+in our army than these fellows.  They go into the trenches at least
+twice a day, under the hottest fire sometimes, to carry hot coffee and
+hot food to the soldiers who fight.  A good many of them have already
+been killed.
+
+"Only the other day--at La Fere I think it was--two of our cooks at
+daybreak went so far forward with their wagon that they were almost
+inside the enemy's lines.  Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got
+separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and
+walked right into them.  The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its
+short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun,
+and they threw down their guns and surrendered.  The two cooks brought
+their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them
+stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast
+coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches.  They are good
+men, those cooks!"
+
+So at last I found out at second hand what one German soldier had done
+to merit the bestowal of the Iron Cross.  But as we came away, I was in
+doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it:
+I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of
+the German Army in this war--the general feeding his men by thousands
+into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the
+pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a
+coffee boiler in his hands--because it was an order.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 9
+
+Viewing A Battle from a Balloon
+
+
+She was anchored to earth in a good-sized field.  Woods horizoned the
+field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth.
+She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from
+tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter
+through her middle.  She was a bright yellow in color--a varnished,
+oily-looking yellow--and in shape suggestive of a frankfurter.
+
+At the end of her near the ground and on the side that was underneath
+--for she swung, you understand, at an angle--a swollen protuberance
+showed, as though an air bubble had got under the skin of the sausage
+during the packing and made a big blister.  She drooped weakly
+amidships, bending and swaying this way and that; and, as we came under
+her and looked up, we saw that the skin of the belly kept shrinking in
+and wrinkling up, in the unmistakable pangs of acute cramp colic.
+
+She had a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most
+flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was
+her normal appearance. Being in the business of spying she practiced
+deceit, with the deliberate intent of seeming to be what, emphatically,
+she was not.  She counterfeited chronic invalidism and she performed
+competently.
+
+She was an observation balloon of the pattern privily chosen by the
+German General Staff, before the beginning of the war, for the use of
+the German Signal Corps.  On this particular date and occasion she
+operated at a point of the highest strategic importance, that point
+being the center of the German battle lines along the River Aisne.
+
+She had been stationed here now for more than a week--that is to say,
+ever since her predecessor was destroyed in a ball of flaming fumes as a
+result of having a bomb flung through the flimsy cloth envelope by a
+coursing and accurate aviator of the enemy.  No doubt she would continue
+to be stationed here until some such mischance befell her too.
+
+On observation balloons, in time of war, no casualty insurance is
+available at any rate of premium.  I believe those who ride in them are
+also regarded as unsuitable risks.  This was highly interesting to hear
+and, for our journalistic purposes, very valuable to know; but, speaking
+personally, I may say that the thing which most nearly concerned me for
+the moment was this: I had just been invited to take a trip aloft in
+this wabbly great wienerwurst, with its painted silk cuticle and its
+gaseous vitals--and had, on impulse, accepted.
+
+I was informed at the time, and have since been reinformed more than
+once, that I am probably the only civilian spectator who has enjoyed
+such a privilege during the present European war.  Assuredly, to date
+and to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am the only civilian who
+has been so favored by the Germans.  Well, I trust I am not hoggish.
+Possessing, as it does, this air of uniqueness, the distinction is worth
+much to me personally.  I would not take anything for the experience;
+but I do not think I shall take it again, even if the chance should come
+my way, which very probably it will not.
+
+It was mid-afternoon; and all day, since early breakfast, we had been
+working our way in automobiles toward this destination.  Already my
+brain chambered more impressions, all jumbled together in a mass, than I
+could possibly hope to get sorted out and graded up and classified in a
+month of trying.  Yet, in a way, the day had been disappointing; for, as
+I may have set forth before, the nearer we came to the actual fighting,
+the closer in touch we got with the battle itself, the less we seemed to
+see of it.
+
+I take it this is true of nearly all battles fought under modern
+military principles.  Ten miles in the rear, or even twenty miles, is
+really a better place to be if you are seeking to fix in your mind a
+reasonably full picture of the scope and effect and consequences of the
+hideous thing called war.  Back there you see the new troops going in,
+girding themselves for the grapple as they go; you see the
+re-enforcements coming up; you see the supplies hurrying forward, and
+the spare guns and the extra equipment, and all the rest of it; you see,
+and can, after a dim fashion, grasp mentally, the thrusting, onward
+movement of this highly scientific and most unromantic industry which
+half the world began practicing in the fall of 1914.
+
+Finally, you see the finished fabrics of the trade coming back; and by
+that I mean the dribbling streams of the wounded and, in the fields and
+woods through which you pass, the dead, lying in windrows where they
+fell.  At the front you see only, for the main part, men engaged in the
+most tedious, the most exacting, and seemingly the most futile form of
+day labor--toiling in filth and foulness and a desperate driven haste,
+on a job that many of them will never live to see finished--if it is
+ever finished; working under taskmasters who spare them not--neither do
+they spare themselves; putting through a dreary contract, whereof the
+chief reward is weariness and the common coinage of payment is death
+outright or death lingering.  That is a battle in these days; that is
+war.
+
+So twistiwise was our route, and so rapidly did we pursue it after we
+left the place where we took lunch, that I confess I lost all sense of
+direction.  It seemed to me our general course was eastward; I
+discovered afterward it was southwesterly.  At any rate we eventually
+found ourselves in a road that wound between high grassy banks along a
+great natural terrace just below the level of the plateau in front of
+Laon.  We saw a few farmhouses, all desolated by shellfire and all
+deserted, and a succession of empty fields and patches of woodland.
+None of the natives were in sight.  Through fear of prying hostile eyes,
+the Germans had seen fit to clear them out of this immediate vicinity.
+Anyhow, a majority of them doubtlessly ran away when fighting first
+started here, three weeks earlier; the Germans had got rid of those who
+remained.  Likewise of troops there were very few to be seen.  We did
+meet one squad of Red Cross men, marching afoot through the dust. They
+were all fully armed, as is the way with the German field-hospital
+helpers; and, for all I know to the contrary, that may be the way with
+the field-hospital helpers of the Allies too.
+
+Though I have often seen it, the Cross on the sleeve-band of a man who
+bears a revolver in his belt, or a rifle on his arm, has always struck
+me as a most incongruous thing.  The noncommissioned officer in charge
+of the squad--chief orderly I suppose you might call him--held by
+leashes four Red Cross dogs.
+
+In Belgium, back in August, I had seen so-called dog batteries.  Going
+into Louvain on the day the Belgian Army, or what was left of it, fell
+back into Brussels, I passed a valley where many dogs were hitched to
+small machine guns; and I could not help wondering what would happen to
+the artillery formation, and what to the discipline of the pack, if a
+rabbit should choose that moment for darting across the battle front.
+
+These, however, were the first dogs I had found engaged in hospital-
+corps employment. They were big, wolfish-looking hounds, shaggy and
+sharp-nosed; and each of the four wore a collar of bells on his neck,
+and a cloth harness on his shoulders, with the red Maltese cross
+displayed on its top and sides.  Their business was to go to the place
+where fighting had taken place and search out the fallen.
+
+At this business they were reputed to be highly efficient.  The Germans
+had found them especially useful; for the German field uniform, which
+has the merit of merging into the natural background at a short
+distance, becomes, through that very protective coloration, a
+disadvantage when its wearer drops wounded and unconscious on the open
+field.  In a poor light the litter bearers might search within a few
+rods of him and never see him; but where the faulty eyesight fails the
+nose of the dog sniffs the human taint in the air, and the dog makes the
+work of rescue thorough and complete.  At least we were told so.
+
+Presently our automobile rounded a bend in the road, and the observation
+balloon, which until that moment we had been unable to glimpse, by
+reason of an intervening formation of ridges, revealed itself before us.
+The suddenness of its appearance was startling.  We did not see it until
+we were within a hundred yards of it.  At once we realized how perfect
+an abiding place this was for a thing which offered so fine and looming
+a target.
+
+Moreover, the balloon was most effectively guarded against attack at
+close range.  We became aware of that fact when we dismounted from the
+automobile and were clambering up the steep bank alongside.  Soldiers
+materialized from everywhere, like dusty specters, but fell back,
+saluting, when they saw that officers accompanied us.  On advice we had
+already thrown away our lighted cigars; but two noncommissioned officers
+felt it to be their bounden duty to warn us against striking matches in
+that neighborhood.  You dare not take chances with a woven bag that is
+packed with many hundred cubic feet of gas.
+
+At the moment of our arrival the balloon was drawn down so near the
+earth that its distorted bottommost extremity dipped and twisted slackly
+within fifty or sixty feet of the grass.
+
+The upper end, reaching much farther into the air, underwent convulsive
+writhings and contortions as an intermittent breeze came over the
+sheltering treetops and buffeted it in puffs.  Almost beneath the
+balloon six big draft horses stood, hitched in pairs to a stout wagon
+frame on which a huge wooden drum was mounted.
+
+Round this drum a wire cable was coiled, and a length of the cable
+stretched like a snake across the field to where it ended in a swivel,
+made fast to the bottom of the riding car.  It was not, strictly
+speaking, a riding car.  It was a straight-up-and-down basket of tough,
+light wicker, no larger and very little deeper than an ordinarily fair-
+sized hamper for soiled linen.  Indeed, that was what it reminded one
+of--a clothesbasket.
+
+Grouped about the team and the wagon were soldiers to the number of
+perhaps a third of a company.  Half a dozen of them stood about the
+basket holding it steady--or trying to.  Heavy sandbags hung pendent-
+wise about the upper rim of the basket, looking very much like so many
+canvased hams; but, even with these drags on it and in spite of the
+grips of the men on the guy ropes of its rigging, it bumped and bounded
+uneasily to the continual rocking of the gas bag above it.  Every moment
+or two it would lift itself a foot or so and tilt and jerk, and then
+come back again with a thump that made it shiver.
+
+Of furnishings the interior of the car contained nothing except a
+telephone, fixed against one side of it; a pair of field glasses, swung
+in a sort of harness; and a strip of tough canvas, looped across halfway
+down in it.  The operator, when wearied by standing, might sit astride
+this canvas saddle, with his legs cramped under him, while he spied out
+the land with his eyes, which would then be just above the top of his
+wicker nest, and while he spoke over the telephone.
+
+The wires of the telephone escaped through a hole under his feet and ran
+to a concealed station at the far side of the field which in turn
+communicated with the main exchange at headquarters three miles away;
+which in its turn radiated other wires to all quarters of the battle
+front.  Now the wires were neatly coiled on the ground beside the
+basket.  A sergeant stood over them to prevent any careless foot from
+stepping on the precious strands.  He guarded them as jealously as a hen
+guards her brood.
+
+The magazine containing retorts of specially prepared gas, for
+recharging the envelope when evaporation and leakage had reduced the
+volume below the lifting and floating point, was nowhere in sight.  It
+must have been somewhere near by, but we saw no signs of it.  Nor did
+our guides for the day offer to show us its whereabouts.  However,
+knowing what I do of the German system of doing things, I will venture
+the assertion that it was snugly hidden and stoutly protected.
+
+These details I had time to take in, when there came across the field to
+join us a tall young officer with a three weeks' growth of stubby black
+beard on his face.  A genial and captivating gentleman was Lieutenant
+Brinkner und Meiningen, and I enjoyed my meeting with him; and often
+since that day in my thoughts I have wished him well. However, I doubt
+whether he will be living by the time these lines see publication.
+
+It is an exciting life a balloon operator in the German Army lives, but
+it is not, as a rule, a long one.  Lieutenant Meiningen was successor to
+a man who was burned to death in mid-air a week before; and on the day
+before a French airman had dropped a bomb from the clouds that missed
+this same balloon by a margin of less than a hundred yards--close
+marksmanship, considering that the airman in question was seven or eight
+thousand feet aloft, and moving at the rate of a mile or so a minute
+when he made his cast.
+
+It was the Lieutenant who said he had authority to take one of our
+number up with him, and it was I who chanced to be nearest to the
+balloon when he extended the invitation. Some one--a friend--removed
+from between my teeth the unlighted cigar I held there, for fear I might
+forget and try to light it; and somebody else--a stranger to me--
+suggested that perhaps I was too heavy for a passenger.
+
+By that time, however, a kindly corporal had boosted me up over the rim
+of the basket and helped me to squeeze through the thick netting of guy
+lines; and there I was, standing inside that overgrown clotheshamper,
+which came up breast high on me--and Brinkner und Meiningen was swinging
+himself nimbly in beside me.  That basket was meant to hold but one man.
+It made a wondrously snug fit for two; the both of us being full-sized
+adults at that.  We stood back to back; and to address the other each
+must needs speak over his shoulder.  The canvas saddle was between us,
+dangling against the calves of our legs; and the telephone was in front
+of the lieutenant, where he could reach the transmitter with his lips by
+stooping a little.
+
+The soldiers began unhooking the sandbags; the sergeant who guarded the
+telephone wire took up a strand of it and held it loosely in his hands,
+ready to pay it out.  Under me I felt the basket heave gently.  Looking
+up I saw that the balloon was no longer a crooked sausage.  She had
+become a big, soft, yellow summer squash, with an attenuated neck. The
+flaccid abdomen flinched in and puffed out, and the snout wabbled to and
+fro.
+
+The lieutenant began telling me things in badly broken but painstaking
+English--such things, for example, as that the baglike protuberance just
+above our heads, at the bottom end of the envelope, contained air,
+which, being heavier than gas, served as a balance to hold her head up
+in the wind and keep her from folding in on herself; also, that it was
+his duty to remain aloft, at the end of his tether, as long as he could,
+meantime studying the effect of the German shell-fire on the enemy's
+position and telephoning down instructions for the better aiming of the
+guns--a job wherein the aeroplane scouts ably reenforced him, since they
+could range at will, whereas his position was comparatively fixed and
+stationary.
+
+Also I remember his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone,
+that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder
+straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to
+explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the
+Allies' lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I
+should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to
+explain.  "However," he added consolingly, "those are possibilities most
+remote.  The rope is not likely to break; and if it did we both should
+probably be dead before we ever reached the earth."
+
+That last statement sank deep into my consciousness; but I fear I did
+not hearken so attentively as I ought to the continuation of the
+lieutenant's conversation, because, right in the middle of his remarks,
+something had begun to happen.
+
+An officer had stepped up alongside to tell me that very shortly I
+should undoubtedly be quite seasick--or, rather, skysick--because of the
+pitching about of the basket when the balloon reached the end of the
+cable; and I was trying to listen to him with one ear and to my
+prospective traveling companion with the other when I suddenly realized
+that the officer's face was no longer on a level with mine.  It was
+several feet below mine.  No; it was not--it was several yards below
+mine.  Now he was looking up toward us, shouting out his words, with his
+hands funneled about his mouth for a speaking trumpet. And at every word
+he uttered he shrank into himself, growing shorter and shorter.
+
+It was not that we seemed to be moving.  We seemed to be standing
+perfectly still, without any motion of any sort except a tiny teetering
+motion of the hamper-basket, while the earth and what was on it fell
+rapidly away from beneath us.  At once all sense of perspective became
+distorted.
+
+When on the roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to
+me so great.  I imagine this is because the building remains stationary
+and a balloon moves.  Almost directly below us was one of our party,
+wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim.  It appeared to me that almost
+instantly his shoulders and body and legs vanished.  Nothing remained of
+him but his hat, which looked exactly like a thumb tack driven into a
+slightly tilted drawing board, the tilted drawing board being the field.
+The field seemed sloped now, instead of flat.
+
+Across the sunken road was another field.  Its owner, I presume, had
+started to turn it up for fall planting, when the armies came along and
+chased him away; so there remained a wide plowed strip, and on each side
+of it a narrower strip of unplowed earth.  Even as I peered downward at
+it, this field was transformed into a width of brown corduroy trimmed
+with green velvet.
+
+For a rudder we carried a long, flapping clothesline arrangement, like
+the tail of a kite, to the lower end of which were threaded seven
+yellow-silk devices suggesting inverted sunshades without handles.
+These things must have been spaced on the tail at equal distances apart,
+but as they rose from the earth and followed after us, whipping in the
+wind, the uppermost one became a big umbrella turned inside out; the
+second was half of a pumpkin; the third was a yellow soup plate; the
+fourth was a poppy bloom; and the remaining three were just amber beads
+of diminishing sizes.
+
+Probably it took longer, but if you asked me I should say that not more
+than two or three minutes had passed before the earth stopped slipping
+away and we fetched up with a profound and disconcerting jerk.  The
+balloon had reached the tip of her hitch line.
+
+She rocked and twisted and bent half double in the pangs of a fearful
+tummy-ache, and at every paroxysm the car lurched in sympathy, only to
+be brought up short by the pull of the taut cable; so that we two,
+wedged in together as we were, nevertheless jostled each other
+violently.  I am a poor sailor, both by instinct and training.  By
+rights and by precedents I should have been violently ill on the
+instant; but I did not have time to be ill.
+
+My fellow traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that
+to me--showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised
+just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted
+suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day--this October
+day was slightly hazy--we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the
+Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which
+the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the
+drum on the wagon a reverse motion, so that the cable was payed out
+evenly and regularly.  But I am afraid I did not listen closely.  My
+eyes were so busy that my ears loafed on the job.
+
+For once in my life--and doubtlessly only once--I saw now
+understandingly a battle front.
+
+It was spread before me--lines and dots and dashes on a big green and
+brown and yellow map.  Why, the whole thing was as plain as a chart.  I
+had a reserved seat for the biggest show on earth.
+
+To be sure it was a gallery seat, for the terrace from which we started
+stood fully five hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we had
+ascended approximately seven hundred feet above that, giving us an
+altitude of, say, twelve hundred feet in all above the level of the
+river; but a gallery seat suited me.  It suited me perfectly.  The great
+plateau, stretching from the high hill behind us, to the river in front
+of us, portrayed itself, when viewed from aloft, as a shallow bowl,
+alternately grooved by small depressions and corrugated by small ridges.
+Here and there were thin woodlands, looking exactly like scrubby
+clothesbrushes.  The fields were checkered squares and oblongs, and a
+ruined village in the distance seemed a jumbled handful of children's
+gray and red blocks.
+
+The German batteries appeared now to be directly beneath us--some of
+them, though in reality I imagine the nearest one must have been nearly
+a mile away on a bee line. They formed an irregular horseshoe, with the
+open end of it toward us.  There was a gap in the horseshoe where the
+calk should have been.  The German trenches, for the most part, lay
+inside the encircling lines of batteries.  In shape they rather
+suggested a U turned upside down; yet it was hard to ascribe to them any
+real shape, since they zigzagged so crazily.  I could tell, though,
+there was sanity in this seeming madness, for nearly every trench was
+joined at an acute angle with its neighbor; so that a man, or a body of
+men, starting at the rear, out of danger, might move to the very front
+of the fighting zone and all the time be well sheltered.  So far as I
+could make out there were but few breaks in the sequence of
+communications.  One of these breaks was almost directly in front of me
+as I stood facing the south.
+
+The batteries of the Allies and their infantry trenches, being so much
+farther away, were less plainly visible.  I could discern their location
+without being able to grasp their general arrangement.  Between the
+nearer infantry trenches of the two opposing forces were tiny dots in
+the ground, each defined by an infinitesimal hillock of yellow earth
+heaped before it--observation pits these, where certain picked men, who
+do not expect to live very long anyway, hide themselves away to keep
+tally on the effect of the shells, which go singing past just over their
+heads to fall among the enemy, who may be only a few hundred feet or a
+few hundred yards away from the observers.
+
+It was an excessively busy afternoon among the guns.  They spoke
+continually--now this battery going, now that; now two or three or a
+dozen together--and the sound of them came up to us in claps and roars
+like summer thunder.  Sometimes, when a battery close by let go, I could
+watch the thin, shreddy trail of fine smoke that marked the arched
+flight of a shrapnel bomb, almost from the very mouth of the gun clear
+to where it burst out into a fluffy white powder puff inside the enemy's
+position.
+
+Contrariwise, I could see how shells from the enemy crossed those shells
+in the air and curved downward to scatter their iron sprays among the
+Germans.  In the midst of all this would come a sharp, spattering sound,
+as though hail in the height of the thunder shower had fallen on a tin
+roof; and that, I learned, meant infantry firing in a trench somewhere.
+
+For a while I watched some German soldiers moving forward through a
+criss-cross of trenches; I took them to be fresh men going in to relieve
+other men who had seen a period of service under fire.  At first they
+suggested moles crawling through plow furrows; then, as they progressed
+onward, they shrank to the smallness of gray grub-worms, advancing one
+behind another.  My eye strayed beyond them a fair distance and fell on
+a row of tiny scarlet dots, like cochineal bugs, showing minutely but
+clearly against the green-yellow face of a ridgy field well inside the
+forward batteries of the French and English.  At that same instant the
+lieutenant must have seen the crawling red line too.  He pointed to it.
+
+"Frenchmen," he said; "French infantrymen's trousers.  One cannot make
+out their coats, but their red trousers show as they wriggle forward on
+their faces."
+
+Better than ever before I realized the idiocy of sending men to fight in
+garments that make vivid targets of them.
+
+My companion may have come up for pleasure, but if business obtruded
+itself on him he did not neglect it.  He bent to his telephone and spoke
+briskly into it.  He used German, but, after a fashion, I made out what
+he said.  He was directing the attention of somebody to the activities
+of those red trousers.
+
+I intended to see what would follow on this, but at this precise moment
+a sufficiently interesting occurrence came to pass at a place within
+much clearer eye range.  The gray grub-worms had shoved ahead until they
+were gray ants; and now all the ants concentrated into a swarm and,
+leaving the trenches, began to move in a slanting direction toward a
+patch of woods far over to our left.  Some of them, I think, got there,
+some of them did not.  Certain puff-balls of white smoke, and one big
+smudge of black smoke, which last signified a bomb of high explosives,
+broke over them and among them, hiding all from sight for a space of
+seconds.  Dust clouds succeeded the smoke; then the dust lifted slowly.
+Those ants were not to be seen.  They had altogether vanished.  It was
+as though an anteater had come forth invisibly and eaten them all up.
+
+Marveling at this phenomenon and unable to convince myself that I had
+seen men destroyed, and not insects, I turned my head south again to
+watch the red ladybugs in the field.  Lo! They were gone too! Either
+they had reached shelter or a painful thing had befallen them.
+
+The telephone spoke a brisk warning.  I think it made a clicking sound.
+I am sure it did not ring; but in any event it called attention to
+itself.  The other man clapped his ear to the receiver and took heed to
+the word that came up the dangling wire, and snapped back an answer.
+
+"I think we should return at once," he said to me over his shoulder.
+"Are you sufficiently wearied?"
+
+I was not sufficiently wearied--I wasn't wearied at all--but he was the
+captain of the ship and I was not even paying for my passage.
+
+The car jerked beneath our unsteady feet and heeled over, and I had the
+sensation of being in an elevator that has started downward suddenly,
+and at an angle to boot.  The balloon resisted the pressure from below.
+It curled up its tail like a fat bumblebee trying to sting itself, and
+the guy ropes, to which I held with both hands, snapped in imitation of
+the rigging of a sailboat in a fair breeze.  Plainly the balloon wished
+to remain where it was or go farther; but the pull of the cable was
+steady and hard, and the world began to rise up to meet us.  Nearing the
+earth it struck me that we were making a remarkably speedy return.  I
+craned my neck to get a view of what was directly beneath.
+
+The six-horse team was advancing toward us at a brisk canter and the
+drum turned fast, taking up the slack of the tether; but, as though not
+satisfied with this rate of progress, several soldiers were running back
+and jumping up to haul in the rope.  The sergeant who took care of the
+telephone was hard put to it to coil down the twin wires.  He skittered
+about over the grass with the liveliness of a cricket.
+
+Many soiled hands grasped the floor of our hamper and eased the jar of
+its contact with the earth.  Those same hands had redraped the rim with
+sandbags, and had helped us to clamber out from between the stay ropes,
+when up came the young captain who spelled the lieutenant as an aerial
+spy.  He came at a run.  Between the two of them ensued a sharp
+interchange of short German sentences.  I gathered the sense of what
+passed.
+
+"I don't see it now," said, in effect, my late traveling mate, staring
+skyward and turning his head.
+
+"Nor do I," answered the captain.  "I thought it was yonder." He flirted
+a thumb backward and upward over his shoulder.
+
+"Are you sure you saw it?"
+
+"No, not sure," said the captain.  "I called you down at the first
+alarm, and right after that it disappeared, I think; but I shall make
+sure."
+
+He snapped an order to the soldiers and vaulted nimbly into the basket.
+The horses turned about and moved off and the balloon rose.  As for the
+lieutenant, he spun round and ran toward the edge of the field, fumbling
+at his belt for his private field glasses as he ran.  Wondering what all
+this bother was about--though I had a vague idea regarding its meaning--
+I watched the ascent.
+
+I should say the bag had reached a height of five hundred feet when,
+behind me, a hundred yards or so away, a soldier shrieked out excitedly.
+Farther along another voice took up the outcry.  From every side of the
+field came shouts.  The field was ringed with clamor.  It dawned on me
+that this spot was even more efficiently guarded than I had conceived it
+to be.
+
+The driver of the wagon swung his lumbering team about with all the
+strength of his arms, and back again came the six horses, galloping now.
+So thickly massed were the men who snatched at the cable, and so eagerly
+did they grab for it, that the simile of a hot handball scrimmage
+flashed into my thoughts.  I will venture that balloon never did a
+faster homing job than it did then.
+
+Fifty men were pointing aloft now, all of them crying out as they
+pointed:
+
+"Flyer! French flyer !"
+
+I saw it.  It was a monoplane.  It had, I judged, just emerged from a
+cloudbank to the southward.  It was heading directly toward our field.
+It was high up--so high up that I felt momentarily amazed that all those
+Germans could distinguish it as a French flyer rather than as an English
+flyer at that distance.
+
+As I looked, and as all of us looked, the balloon basket hit the earth
+and was made fast; and in that same instant a cannon boomed somewhere
+well over to the right.  Even as someone who knew sang out to us that
+this was the balloon cannon in the German aviation field back of the
+town opening up, a tiny ball of smoke appeared against the sky,
+seemingly quite close to the darting flyer, and blossomed out with
+downy, dainty white petals, like a flower.
+
+The monoplane veered, wheeled and began to drive in a wriggling,
+twisting course.  The balloon cannon spoke again.  Four miles away, to
+the eastward, its fellow in another aviation camp let go, and the sound
+of its discharge came to us faintly but distinctly. Another smoke flower
+unfolded in the heavens, somewhat below the darting airship.
+
+Both guns were in action now.  Each fired at six-second intervals.  All
+about the flitting target the smokeballs burst--above it, below it, to
+this side of it and to that.  They polka-dotted the heavens in the area
+through which the Frenchman scudded.  They looked like a bed of white
+water lilies and he like a black dragonfly skimming among the lilies.
+It was a pretty sight and as thrilling a one as I have ever seen.
+
+I cannot analyze my emotions as I viewed the spectacle, let alone try to
+set them down on paper.  Alongside of this, big-game hunting was a
+commonplace thing, for this was big-game hunting of a magnificent kind,
+new to the world--revolving cannon, with a range of from seven to eight
+thousand feet, trying to bring down a human being out of the very
+clouds.
+
+He ran for his life.  Once I thought they had him.  A shell burst
+seemingly quite close to him, and his machine dipped far to one side and
+dropped through space at that angle for some hundreds of feet
+apparently.
+
+A yell of exultation rose from the watching Germans, who knew that an
+explosion close to an aeroplane is often sufficient, through the force
+of air concussion alone, to crumple the flimsy wings and bring it down,
+even though none of the flying shrapnel from the bursting bomb actually
+touch the operator or the machine.
+
+However, they whooped their joy too soon.  The flyer righted, rose,
+darted confusingly to the right, then to the left, and then bored
+straight into a woolly white cloudrack and was gone.  The moment it
+disappeared the two balloon cannon ceased firing; and I, taking stock of
+my own sensations, found myself quivering all over and quite hoarse.
+
+I must have done some yelling myself; but whether I rooted for the flyer
+to get away safely or for the cannon to hit him, I cannot for the life
+of me say.  I can only trust that I preserved my neutrality and rooted
+for both.
+
+Subsequently I decided in my own mind that from within the Allies' lines
+the Frenchman saw us--meaning the lieutenant and myself--in the air, and
+came forth with intent to bombard us from on high; that, seeing us
+descend, he hid in a cloud ambush, venturing out once more, with his
+purpose renewed, when the balloon reascended, bearing the captain.  I
+liked to entertain that idea, because it gave me a feeling of having
+shared to some degree in a big adventure.
+
+As for the captain and the lieutenant, they advanced no theories
+whatever.  The thing was all in the day's work to them.  It had happened
+before.  I have no doubt it has happened many times since.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 10
+
+In the Trenches Before Rheims
+
+
+After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of an
+anticlimax--was bound to be anti-climactic.  Yet the remainder of the
+afternoon was not without action.  Not an hour later, as we stood in a
+battery of small field guns--guns I had watched in operation from my
+lofty gallery seat--another flyer, or possibly the same one we had
+already seen, appeared in the sky, coming now in a long swinging sweep
+from the southwest, and making apparently for the very spot where our
+party had stationed itself to watch the trim little battery perform.
+
+It had already dropped some form of deadly souvenir we judged, for we
+saw a jet of black smoke go geysering up from a woodland where a German
+corps commander had his field headquarters, just after the airship
+passed over that particular patch of timber. As it swirled down the wind
+in our direction the vigilant balloon guns again got its range, and, to
+the throbbing tune of their twin boomings, it ducked and dodged away,
+executing irregular and hurried upward spirals until the cloud-fleece
+swallowed it up.
+
+The driver of that monoplane was a persistent chap.  I am inclined to
+believe he was the selfsame aviator who ventured well inside the German
+lines the following morning.  While at breakfast in the prefecture at
+Laon we heard the cannoneer-sharpshooters when they opened on him; and
+as we ran to the windows--we Americans, I mean, the German officers
+breakfasting with us remaining to finish their coffee--we saw a colonel,
+whom we had met the night before, sitting on a bench in the old
+prefecture flower garden and looking up into the skies through the
+glasses that every German officer, of whatsoever degree, carries with
+him at all times.
+
+He looked and looked; then he lowered his glasses and put them back into
+their case, and took up the book he had been reading.
+
+"He got away again," said the colonel regretfully, seeing us at the
+window.  "Plucky fellow, that! I hope we kill him soon.  The airmen say
+he is a Frenchman, but my guess is that he is English." And then he went
+on reading.
+
+Getting back to the afternoon before, I must add that it was not a bomb
+which the flying man threw into the edge of the woods.  He had a
+surprise for his German adversaries that day.  Soon after we left the
+stand of the field guns a civilian Red Cross man halted our machines to
+show us a new device for killing men.  It was a steel dart, of the
+length and thickness of a fountain pen, and of much the same aspect.  It
+was pointed like a needle at one end, and at the other was fashioned
+into a tiny rudder arrangement, the purpose of this being to hold it
+upright---point downward--as it descended.  It was an innocent-looking
+device--that dart; but it was deadlier than it seemed.
+
+"That flyer at whom our guns were firing a while ago dropped this,"
+explained the civilian. "He pitched out a bomb that must have contained
+hundreds of these darts; and the bomb was timed to explode a thousand or
+more feet above the earth and scatter the darts.  Some of them fell into
+a cavalry troop on the road leading to La Fere.
+
+"Hurt anyone? Ach, but yes! Hurt many and killed several--both men and
+horses.  One dart hit a trooper on top of his head.  It went through his
+helmet, through his skull, his brain, his neck, his body, his leg--all
+the way through him lengthwise it went.  It came out of his leg, split
+open his horse's flank, and stuck in the hard road.
+
+"I myself saw the man afterward.  He died so quickly that his hand still
+held his bridle rein after he fell from the saddle; and the horse
+dragged him--his corpse, rather--many feet before the fingers relaxed."
+
+The officers who were with us were tremendously interested--not
+interested, mind you, in the death of that trooper, spitted from the
+heavens by a steel pencil, but interested in the thing that had done the
+work.  It was the first dart they had seen.  Indeed, I think until then
+this weapon had not been used against the Germans in this particular
+area of the western theater of war.  These officers passed it about,
+fingering it in turn, and commenting on the design of it and the
+possibilities of its use.
+
+"Typically French," the senior of them said at length, handing it back
+to its owner, the Red Cross man--"a very clever idea too; but it might
+be bettered, I think." He pondered a moment, then added, with the racial
+complacence that belongs to a German military man when he considers
+military matters: "No doubt we shall adopt the notion; but we'll improve
+on the pattern and the method of discharging it.  The French usually
+lead the way in aerial inventions, but the Germans invariably perfect
+them."
+
+The day wound up and rounded out most fittingly with a trip eastward
+along the lines to the German siege investments in front of Rheims.  We
+ran for a while through damaged French hamlets, each with its soldier
+garrison to make up for the inhabitants who had fled; and then, a little
+later, through a less well-populated district.  In the fields, for long
+stretches, nothing stirred except pheasants, feeding on the neglected
+grain, and big, noisy magpies.  The roads were empty, too, except that
+there were wrecked shells of automobiles and bloated carcasses of dead
+troop horses.  When the Germans, in their campaigning, smash up an
+automobile--and traveling at the rate they do there must be many
+smashed--they capsize it at the roadside, strip it of its tires, draw
+off the precious gasoline, pour oil over it and touch a match to it.
+What remains offers no salvage to friend, or enemy either.
+
+The horses rot where they drop unless the country people choose to put
+the bodies underground.  We counted the charred cadavers of fifteen
+automobiles and twice as many dead horses during that ride.  The smell
+of horseflesh spoiled the good air.  When passing through a wood the
+smell was always heavier.  We hoped it was only dead horses we smelled
+there.
+
+When there has been fighting in France or Belgium, almost any thicket
+will give up hideous grisly secrets to the man who goes searching there.
+Men sorely wounded in the open share one trait at least with the lower
+animals.  The dying creature--whether man or beast--dreads to lie and
+die in the naked field.  It drags itself in among the trees if it has
+the strength.
+
+I believe every woodland in northern France was a poison place, and
+remained so until the freezing of winter sealed up its abominations
+under ice and frost.
+
+Nearing Rheims we turned into a splendid straight highway bordered by
+trees, where the late afternoon sunlight filtered through the dead
+leaves, which still hung from the boughs and dappled the yellow road
+with black splotches, until it made you think of jaguar pelts. Midway of
+our course here we met troops moving toward us in force.  First, as
+usual, came scouts on bicycles and motorcycles.  One young chap had
+woven sheaves of dahlias and red peonies into the frame of his wheel,
+and through the clump of quivering blossoms the barrel of his rifle
+showed, like a black snake in a bouquet.  He told us that troops were
+coming behind, going to the extreme right wing--a good many thousands of
+troops, he thought.  Ordinarily Uhlans would have followed behind the
+bicycle men, but this time a regiment of Brunswick Hussars formed the
+advance guard, riding four abreast and making a fine show, what with
+their laced gray jackets and their lanes of nodding lances, and their
+tall woolly busbies, each with its grinning brass death's-head set into
+the front of it.
+
+There was a blithe young officer who insisted on wheeling out of the
+line and halting us, and passing the time of day with us.  I imagine he
+wanted to exercise his small stock of English words.  Well, it needed
+the exercise.  The skull-and-bones poison label on his cap made a
+wondrous contrast with the smiling eyes and the long, humorous,
+wrinkled-up nose below it.
+
+"A miserable country," he said, with a sweep of his arm which
+comprehended all Northwestern Europe, from the German border to the sea
+--"so little there is to eat! My belly--she is mostly empty always.  But
+on the yesterday I have the much great fortune. I buy me a swine--what
+you call him?--a pork? Ah, yes; a pig.  I buy me a pig.  He is a living
+pig; very noisy, as you say--very loud.  I bring him twenty kilometers
+in an automobile, and all the time he struggle to be free; and he cry
+out all the time.  It is very droll--not?--me and the living pig, which
+ride, both together, twenty kilometers!"
+
+We took some letters from him to his mother and sweetheart, to be mailed
+when we got back on German soil; and he spurred on, beaming back at us
+and waving his free hand over his head.
+
+For half an hour or so, we, traveling rapidly, passed the column, which
+was made up of cavalry, artillery and baggage trains.  I suppose the
+infantry was going by another road. The dragoons sang German marching
+songs as they rode by, but the artillerymen were dour and silent lot for
+the most part.  Repeatedly I noticed that the men who worked the big
+German guns were rarely so cheerful as the men who belonged to the other
+wings of the service; certainly it was true in this instance.
+
+We halted two miles north of Rheims in the front line of the German
+works.  Here was a little shattered village; its name, I believe, was
+Brimont.  And here, also, commanding the road, stood a ruined fortress
+of an obsolete last-century pattern.  Shellfire had battered it into a
+gruel of shattered red masonry; but German officers were camped within
+its more habitable parts, and light guns were mounted in the moat.
+
+The trees thereabout had been mowed down by the French artillery from
+within the city, so that the highway was littered with their tops.
+Also, the explosives had dug big gouges in the earth.  Wherever you
+looked you saw that the soil was full of small, raggedy craters.
+Shrapnel was dropping intermittently in the vicinity; therefore we left
+our cars behind the shelter of the ancient fort and proceeded cautiously
+afoot until we reached the frontmost trenches.
+
+Evidently the Germans counted on staying there a good while.  The men
+had dug out caves in the walls of the trenches, bedding them with straw
+and fitting them with doors taken from the wreckage of the houses of the
+village.  We inspected one of these shelters.  It had earthen walls and
+a sod roof, fairly water-tight, and a green window shutter to rest
+against the entrance for a windbreak.  Six men slept here, and the wag
+of the squad had taken chalk and lettered the words "Kaiserhof Cafe" on
+the shutter.
+
+The trenches were from seven to eight feet deep; but by climbing up into
+the little scarps of the sharpshooters and resting our elbows in niches
+in the earth, meantime keeping our heads down to escape the attentions
+of certain Frenchmen who were reported to be in a wood half a mile away,
+we could, with the aid of our glasses, make out the buildings in Rheims,
+some of which were then on fire--particularly the great Cathedral.
+
+Viewed from that distance it did not appear to be badly damaged.  One of
+the towers had apparently been shorn away and the roof of the nave was
+burned--we could tell that. We were too far away of course to judge of
+the injury to the carvings and to the great rose window.
+
+Already during that week, from many sources, we had heard the Germans'
+version of the shelling of Rheims Cathedral, their claim being that they
+purposely spared the pile from the bombardment until they found the
+defenders had signal men in the towers; that twice they sent officers,
+under flags of truce, to urge the French to withdraw their signalers;
+and only fired on the building when both these warnings had been
+disregarded, ceasing to fire as soon as they had driven the enemy from
+the towers.
+
+I do not vouch for this story; but we heard it very frequently.  Now,
+from one of the young officers who had escorted us into the trench, we
+were hearing it all over again, with elaborations, when a shrapnel shell
+from the town dropped and burst not far behind us, and rifle bullets
+began to plump into the earthen bank a little to the right of us; so we
+promptly went away from there.
+
+We were noncombatants and nowise concerned in the existing controversy;
+but we remembered the plaintive words of the Chinese Minister at
+Brussels when he called on our Minister--Brand Whitlock--to ascertain
+what Whitlock would advise doing in case the advancing Germans fired on
+the city.  Whitlock suggested to his Oriental brother that he retire to
+his official residence and hoist the flag of his country over it,
+thereby making it neutral and protected territory.
+
+"But, Mister Whitlock," murmured the puzzled Chinaman, "the cannon--he
+has no eyes!"
+
+We rode back to Laon through the falling dusk.  The western sky was all
+a deep saffron pink--the color of a salmon's belly--and we could hear
+the constant blaspheming of the big siege guns, taking up the evening
+cannonade along the center.  Pretty soon we caught up with the column
+that was headed for the right wing.  At that hour it was still in
+motion, which probably meant forced marching for an indefinite time.
+Viewed against the sunset yellow, the figures of the dragoons stood up
+black and clean, as conventionalized and regular as though they had all
+been stenciled on that background.  Seeing next the round, spiked
+helmets of the cannoneers outlined in that weird half-light, I knew of
+what those bobbing heads reminded me.  They were like pictures of Roman
+centurions.
+
+Within a few minutes the afterglow lost its yellowish tone and burned as
+a deep red flare. As we swung off into a side road the columns were
+headed right into that redness, and turning to black cinder-shapes as
+they rode.  It was as though they marched into a fiery furnace, treading
+the crimson paths of glory--which are not glorious and probably never
+were, but which lead most unerringly to the grave.
+
+A week later, when we learned what had happened on the right wing, and
+of how the Germans had fared there under the battering of the Allies,
+the thought of that open furnace door came back to me.  I think of it
+yet-often.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 11
+
+War de Luxe
+
+
+"I think," said a colonel of the ordnance department as we came out into
+the open after a good but a hurried and fly-ridden breakfast--"I think,"
+he said in his excellent Saxonized English, "that it would be as well to
+look at our telephone exchange first of all. It perhaps might prove of
+some small interest to you."  With that he led the way through a jumble
+of corridors to a far corner of the Prefecture of Laon, perching high on
+the Hill of Laon and forming for the moment the keystone of the arch of
+the German center.  So that was how the most crowded day in a reasonably
+well-crowded newspaperman's life began for me--with a visit to a room
+which had in other days been somebody's reception parlor.  We came upon
+twelve soldier-operators sitting before portable switchboards with metal
+transmitters clamped upon their heads, giving and taking messages to and
+from all the corners and crannies of the mid-battle-front.  This little
+room was the solar plexus of the army.  To it all the tingling nerves of
+the mighty organism ran and in it all the ganglia centered.  At two
+sides of the room the walls were laced with silk-covered wires appliqued
+as thickly and as closely and as intricately as the threads in old point
+lace, and over these wires the gray-coated operators could talk--and did
+talk pretty constantly--with all the trenches and all the batteries and
+all the supply camps and with the generals of brigades and of divisions
+and of corps.
+
+One wire ran upstairs to the Over-General's sleeping quarters and ended,
+so we were told, in a receiver that hung upon the headboard of his bed.
+Another stretched, by relay points, to Berlin, and still another ran to
+the headquarters of the General Staff where the Kaiser was, somewhere
+down the right wing; and so on and so forth.  If war is a business these
+times instead of a chivalric calling, then surely this was the main
+office and clearing house of the business.
+
+To our novice eyes the wires seemed snarled--snarled inextricably,
+hopelessly, eternally--and we said as much, but the ordnance colonel
+said behind this apparent disorder a most careful and particular
+orderliness was hidden away.  Given an hour's notice, these busy men who
+wore those steel vises clamped upon their ears could disconnect the
+lines, pull down and reel in the wires, pack the batteries and the
+exchanges, and have the entire outfit loaded upon automobiles for speedy
+transmission elsewhere.  Having seen what I had seen of the German
+military system, I could not find it in my heart to doubt this.
+Miracles had already become commonplaces; what might have been epic once
+was incidental now.  I hearkened and believed.
+
+At his command a sergeant plugged in certain stops upon a keyboard and
+then when the Colonel, taking a hand telephone up from a table, had
+talked into it in German he passed it into my hands.
+
+"The captain at the other end of the line knows English," he said.
+"I've just told him you wish to speak with him for a minute." I pressed
+the rubber disk to my ear.  "Hello!" I said.
+
+"Hello!" came back the thin-strained answer.  "This is such and such a
+trench"--giving the number--"in front of Cerny.  What do you want to
+know?"
+
+"What's the news there?" I stammered fatuously.
+
+A pleasant little laugh tinkled through the strainer.
+
+"Oh, it's fairly quiet now," said the voice.  "Yesterday afternoon
+shrapnel fire rather mussed us up, but to-day nothing has happened.
+We're just lying quiet and enjoying the fine weather.  We've had much
+rain lately and my men are enjoying the change."
+
+So that was all the talk I had with a man who had for weeks been living
+in a hole in the ground with a ditch for an exercise ground and the
+brilliant prospects of a violent death for his hourly and daily
+entertainment.  Afterward when it was too late I thought of a number of
+leading questions which I should have put to that captain.  Undoubtedly
+there was a good story in him could you get it out.
+
+We came through a courtyard at the north side of the building, and the
+courtyard was crowded with automobiles of all the known European sizes
+and patterns and shapes--automobiles for scout duty, with saw-edged
+steel prows curving up over the drivers' seats to catch and cut dangling
+wires; automobiles fitted as traveling pharmacies and needing only red-
+and-green lights to be regular prescription drug stores; automobile-
+ambulances rigged with stretchers and first-aid kits; automobiles for
+carrying ammunition and capable of moving at tremendous speed for
+tremendous distances; automobile machine guns or machine-gun
+automobiles, just as suits you; automobile cannon; and an automobile
+mail wagon, all holed inside, like honeycomb, with two field-postmen
+standing up in it, back to back, sorting out the contents of snugly
+packed pouches; and every third letter was not a letter, strictly
+speaking, at all, but a small flat parcel containing chocolate or cigars
+or handkerchiefs or socks or even light sweaters--such gifts as might be
+sent to the soldiers, stamp-free, from any part of the German Empire.  I
+wonder how men managed to wage war in the days before the automobile.
+
+Two waiting cars received our party and our guides and our drivers, and
+we went corkscrewing down the hill, traversing crooked ways that were
+astonishingly full of German soldiers and astonishingly free of French
+townspeople.  Either the citizens kept to their closed-up houses or,
+having run away at the coming of the enemy, they had not yet dared to
+return, although so far as I might tell there was no danger of their
+being mistreated by the gray-backs.  Reaching the plain which is below
+the city we streaked westward, our destination being the field wireless
+station.
+
+Nothing happened on the way except that we overtook a file of slightly
+wounded prisoners who, having been treated at the front, were now bound
+for a prison in a convent yard, where they would stay until a train
+carried them off to Munster or Dusseldorf for confinement until the
+end of the war.  I counted them.--two English Tommies, two French
+officers, one lone Belgian--how he got that far down into France nobody
+could guess--and twenty-eight French cannoneers and infantrymen,
+including some North Africans.  Every man Jack of them was bandaged
+either about the head or about the arms, or else he favored an injured
+leg as he hobbled slowly on.  Eight guards were nursing them along;
+their bayonets were socketed in their carbine barrels.  No doubt the
+magazines of the carbines were packed with those neat brass capsules
+which carry doses of potential death; but the guards, except for the
+moral effect of the thing, might just as well have been bare-handed.
+None of the prisoners could have run away even had he been so minded.
+The poor devils were almost past walking, let alone running.  They
+wouldn't even look up as we went by them.
+
+The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his
+belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger
+who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher
+dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is
+gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas.  Modern military science has
+wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of
+the old game of war.  Bands no longer play the forces into the fight--
+indeed I have seen no more bands afield with the dun-colored files of
+the Germans than I might count on the fingers of my two hands; and
+flags, except on rare show-off occasions, do not float above the heads
+of the columns; and officers dress as nearly as possible like common
+soldiers; and the courier's work is done with much less glamour but with
+in-, finitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone, and by
+the aeroplane man, and most of all by the air currents of the wireless
+equipment.  We missed the gallant courier, but then the wireless was
+worth seeing too.
+
+It stood in a trampled turnip field not very far beyond the ruined Porte
+St. Martin at the end of the Rue St. Martin, and before we came to it we
+passed the Monument des Instituteurs, erected in 1899--as the
+inscription upon it told us--by a grateful populace to the memory of
+three school teachers of Laon who, for having raised a revolt of
+students and civilians against the invader in the Franco-Prussian War,
+were taken and bound and shot against a wall, in accordance with the
+system of dealing with ununiformed enemies which the Germans developed
+hereabouts in 1870 and perfected hereabouts in 1914.  A faded wreath,
+which evidently was weeks old, lay at the bronze feet of the three
+figures.  But the institute behind the monument was an institute no
+longer.  It had become, over night as it were, a lazaret for the
+wounded.  Above its doors the Red Cross flag and the German flag were
+crossed--emblems of present uses and present proprietorship.  Also many
+convalescent German soldiers sunned themselves upon the railing about
+the statue.  They seemed entirely at home.  When the Germans take a town
+they mark it with their own mark, as cattlemen in Texas used to mark a
+captured maverick; after which to all intents it becomes German.  We
+halted a moment here.
+
+"That's French enough for you," said the young officer who was riding
+with us, turning in his seat to speak--"putting up a monument to glorify
+three francs-tireurs.  In Germany the people would not be allowed to do
+such a thing.  But it is not humanly conceivable that they would have
+such a wish.  We revere soldiers who die for the Fatherland, not men who
+refuse to enlist when the call comes and yet take up arms to make a
+guerrilla warfare."
+
+Which remark, considering the circumstances and other things, was
+sufficiently typical for all purposes, as I thought at the time and
+still think.  You see I had come to the place where I could understand a
+German soldier's national and racial point of view, though I doubt his
+ability ever of understanding mine.  To him, now, old John Burns of
+Gettysburg, going out in his high, high hat and his long, long coat to
+fight with the boys would never, could never be the heroic figure which
+he is in the American imagination; he would have been a meddlesome
+malefactor deserving of immediate death.  For 1778 write it 1914, and
+Molly Pitcher serving at the guns would have been in no better case
+before a German court-martial.  I doubt whether a Prussian Stonewall
+Jackson would give orders to kill a French Barbara Frietchie, but
+assuredly he would lock that venturesome old person up in a fortress
+where she could not hoist her country's flag nor invite anybody to shoot
+her gray head.  For you must know that the German who ordinarily brims
+over with that emotion which, lacking a better name for it, we call
+sentiment, drains all the sentiment out of his soul when he takes his
+gun in his hand and goes to war.
+
+Among the frowzy turnip tops two big dull gray automobiles were
+stranded, like large hulks in a small green sea.  Alongside them a
+devil's darning-needle of a wireless mast stuck up, one hundred and odd
+feet, toward the sky.  It was stayed with many steel guy ropes, like the
+center pole of a circus top.  It was of the collapsible model and might
+therefore be telescoped into itself and taken down in twenty minutes, so
+we were informed pride-fully by the captain in charge; and from its
+needle-pointed tip the messages caught out of the ether came down by
+wire conductors to the interior of one of the stalled automobiles and
+there were noted down and, whenever possible, translated by two soldier-
+operators, who perched on wooden stools among batteries and things, for
+which I know not the technical names.  The spitty snarl of the apparatus
+filled the air for rods roundabout.  It made you think of a million
+gritty slate pencils squeaking over a million slates all together.  We
+were permitted to take up the receivers and listen to a faint scratching
+sound which must have come from a long way off.
+
+Indeed the officer told us that it was a message from the enemy that we
+heard.
+
+"Our men just picked it up," he explained; "we think it must come from a
+French wireless station across the river.  Naturally we cannot
+understand it, any more than they can understand our messages--they're
+all in code, you know.  Every day or two we change our code, and I
+presume they do too."
+
+Two of our party had unshipped their cameras by now, for the pass which
+we carried entitled us, among other important things, to commandeer that
+precious fluid, gasoline, whenever needed, and to take photographs; but
+we were asked to make no shapshots here.  We gathered that there were
+certain reasons not unconnected with secret military usage why we might
+not take away with us plates bearing pictures of the field wireless. In
+the main, though, remarkably few restrictions were laid upon us that
+day.  Once or twice, very casually, somebody asked us to refrain from
+writing about this thing or that thing which we had seen; but that was
+all.
+
+In a corner of the turnip field close up to the road were mounds of
+fresh-turned clay, and so many of them were there and so closely were
+they spaced and for so considerable a distance did they stretch along,
+they made two long yellow ribs above the herbage.  At close intervals
+small wooden crosses were stuck up in the rounded combs of earth so that
+the crosses formed a sort of irregular fence.  A squad of soldiers were
+digging more holes in the tough earth.  Their shovel blades flashed in
+the sunlight and the clods flew up in showers.
+
+"We have many buried over there," said an artillery captain, seeing that
+I watched the grave diggers, "a general among them and other officers.
+It is there we bury those who die in the Institute hospital.  Every day
+more die, and so each morning trenches are made ready for those who will
+die during that day.  A good friend of mine is over there; he was buried
+day before yesterday.  I sat up late last night writing to his wife--or
+perhaps I should say his widow.  They had been married only a few weeks
+when the call came.  It will be very hard on her."
+
+He did not name the general who lay over yonder, nor did we ask him the
+name.  To ask would not have been etiquette, and for him to answer would
+have been worse.  Rarely in our wanderings did we find a German soldier
+of whatsoever rank who referred to his superior officer by name.  He
+merely said "My captain" or "Our colonel." And this was of a piece with
+the plan--not entirely confined to the Germans--of making a secret of
+losses of commanders and movements of commands.
+
+We went thence then, the distance being perhaps three miles by road and
+not above eight minutes by automobile at the rate we traveled to an
+aviation camp at the back side of the town.  Here was very much to see,
+including many aeroplanes of sorts domiciled under canvas hangars and a
+cheerful, chatty, hospitable group of the most famous aviators in the
+German army--lean, keen young men all of them--and a sample specimen of
+the radish-shaped bomb which these gentlemen carry aloft with the intent
+of dropping it upon their enemies when occasion shall offer.  Each of us
+in turn solemnly hefted the bomb to feel its weight.  I should guess it
+weighed thirty pounds--say, ten pounds for the case and twenty pounds
+for its load of fearsome ingredients.  Finally, yet foremost, we were
+invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this
+particular arm of the German Army--a balloon-cannon, so called.
+
+The balloon-gun of this size is--or was at the date when I saw it--an
+exclusively German institution.  I believe the Allies have balloon-guns
+too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say.  This
+one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored-
+steel truck.  It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady's watch
+and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant
+automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd
+draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour,
+for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.
+
+The person in authority here was a youthful and blithe lieutenant--an
+Iron Cross man--with pale, shallow blue eyes and a head of bright blond
+hair.  He spun one small wheel to show how his pet's steel nose might be
+elevated almost straight upward; then turned another to show how the gun
+might be swung, as on a pivot, this way and that to command the range of
+the entire horizon, and he concluded the performance, with the aid of
+several husky lads in begrimed gray, by going through the pantomime of
+loading with a long yellow five-inch shell from the magazine behind him,
+and pretending to fire, meanwhile explaining that he could send one shot
+aloft every six seconds and with each shot reach a maximum altitude of
+between seven and eight thousand feet.  Altogether it was a very pretty
+sight to see and most edifying.  Likewise it took on an added interest
+when we learned that the blue-eyed youth and his brother of a twin
+balloon-cannon at the front of Laon had during the preceding three weeks
+brought down four of the enemy's airmen, and were exceedingly hopeful of
+fattening their joint average before the present week had ended.
+
+After that we took photographs ad lib and McCutcheon had a trip with
+Ingold, a great aviator, in a biplane, which the Germans call a double-
+decker, as distinguished from the Taube or monoplane, with its birdlike
+wings and curved tail rudder-piece.  Just as they came down, after a
+circular spin over the lines, a strange machine, presumably hostile,
+appeared far up and far away, but circled off to the south out of target
+reach before the balloon gunman could get the range of her and the aim.
+On the heels of this a biplane from another aviation field somewhere
+down the left wing dropped in quite informally bearing two grease-
+stained men to pass the time of day and borrow some gasoline.  The
+occasion appeared to demand a drink.  We all repaired, therefore, to one
+of the great canvas houses where the air birds nest night-times and
+where the airmen sleep.  There we had noggins of white wine all round,
+and a pointer dog, which was chained to an officer's trunk, begged me in
+plain pointer language to cast off his leash so he might go and stalk
+the covey of pheasants that were taking a dust-bath in the open road not
+fifty yards away.
+
+The temptation was strong, but our guides said if we meant to get to the
+battlefront before lunch it was time, and past time, we got started.
+Being thus warned we did get started.
+
+Of a battle there is this to be said--that the closer you get to it the
+less do you see of it. Always in my experiences in Belgium and my more
+recent experiences in France I found this to be true.  Take, for
+example, the present instance.  I knew that we were approximately in the
+middle sworl of the twisting scroll formed by the German center, and
+that we were at this moment entering the very tip of the enormous
+inverted V made by the frontmost German defenses.  I knew that
+stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line
+some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry
+millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy-
+wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and
+the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as
+having been fought in this war or any lesser war.  I knew this fight had
+been going on for weeks now back and forth upon the River Aisne and
+would certainly go on for weeks and perhaps months more to come.  I knew
+these things because I had been told them; but I shouldn't have known if
+I hadn't been told.  I shouldn't even have guessed it.
+
+I recall that we traveled at a cup-racing clip along a road that first
+wound like a coiling snake and then straightened like a striking snake,
+and that always we traveled through dust so thick it made a fog.  In
+this chalky land of northern France the brittle soil dries out after a
+rain very quickly, and turns into a white powder where there are wheels
+to churn it up and grit it fine.  Here surely there was an abundance of
+wheels.  We passed many marching men and many lumbering supply trains
+which were going our way, and we met many motor ambulances and many
+ammunition trucks which were coming back.  Always the ambulances were
+full and the ammunition wagons were empty.  I judge an expert in these
+things might by the fullness of the one and the emptiness of the other
+gauge the emphasis with which the fight ahead went on.  The drivers of
+the trucks nearly all wore captured French caps and French uniform
+coats, which adornment the marching men invariably regarded as a quaint
+jest to be laughed at and cheered for.
+
+We stopped at our appointed place, which was on the top of a ridge where
+a general of a corps had his headquarters.  From here one had a view--a
+fair view and, roughly, a fan-shaped view--of certain highly important
+artillery operations.  Likewise, the eminence, gentle and gradual as it
+was, commanded a mile-long stretch of the road, which formed the main
+line of communication between the front and the base; and these two
+facts in part explained why the general had made this his abiding place.
+Even my layman's mind could sense the reasons for establishing
+headquarters at such a spot.
+
+As for the general, he and his staff, at the moment of our arrival in
+their midst, were stationed at the edge of a scanty woodland where
+telescopes stood and a table with maps and charts on it.  Quite with the
+manner of men who had nothing to do except to enjoy the sunshine and
+breathe the fresh air, they strolled back and forth in pairs and trios.
+I think it must have been through force of habit that, when they halted
+to turn about and retrace the route, they stopped always for a moment or
+two and faced southward.  It was from the southward that there came
+rolling up to us the sounds of a bellowing chorus of gunfire--a
+Wagnerian chorus, truly.  That perhaps was as it should be. Wagner's
+countrymen were helping to make it.  Now the separate reports strung out
+until you could count perhaps three between reports; now they came so
+close together that the music they made was a constant roaring which
+would endure for a minute on a stretch, or half a minute anyhow.  But
+for all the noticeable heed which any uniformed men in my vicinity paid
+to this it might as well have been blasting in a distant stone quarry.
+This attitude which they maintained, coupled with the fact that
+seemingly all the firing did no damage whatsoever, only served to
+strengthen the illusion that after all it was not the actual business of
+warfare which spread itself beneath our eyes.
+
+Apparently most of the shells from the Allies' side--which of course was
+the far side from us--rose out of a dip in the contour of the land.
+Rising so, they mainly fell among or near the shattered remnants of two
+hamlets upon the nearer front of a little hill perhaps three miles from
+our location.  A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a
+wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.
+
+There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black
+as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high
+explosives.  Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little
+blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they
+told us, would be shrapnel.  The German reply to the enemy's guns issued
+from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and
+these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and
+beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and,
+curving downward, exploded out of our sight.
+
+"The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages,"
+said one of the general's aides to me.  "They are wasting their powder.
+There are many men there and some among them are Germans, but they are
+all dead men."
+
+He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the
+telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I
+focused for distance.  Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang
+up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in
+the face of a little hillock.  This trench was full of gray figures of
+the size of very small dolls.  They were moving aimlessly back and
+forth, it seemed to me, doing nothing at all.
+
+Then I saw another trench that ran slantwise up the hillock and it
+contained more of the pygmies.  A number of these pygmies came out of
+their trench--I could see them quite plainly, clambering up the steep
+wall of it--and they moved, very slowly it would seem, toward the
+crosswise trench on ahead a bit.  To reach it they had to cross a
+sloping green patch of cleared land.  So far as I might tell no
+explosive or shrapnel shower fell into them or near them, but when they
+had gone perhaps a third of the distance across the green patch there
+was a quick scatteration of their inch-high figures.  Quite distinctly I
+counted three manikins who instantly fell down flat and two others who
+went ahead a little way deliberately, and then lay down.  The rest
+darted back to the cover which they had just quit and jumped in briskly.
+The five figures remained where they had dropped and became quiet.
+Anyway, I could detect no motion in them.  They were just little gray
+strips.  Into my mind on the moment came incongruously a memory of what
+I had seen a thousand times in the composing room of a country newspaper
+where the type was set by hand.  I thought of five pica plugs lying on
+the printshop floor.
+
+It was hard for me to make myself believe that I had seen human beings
+killed and wounded.  I can hardly believe it yet--that those
+insignificant toy-figures were really and truly men.  I watched through
+the glass after that for possibly twenty minutes, until the summons came
+for lunch, but no more of the German dolls ventured out of their make-
+believe defenses to be blown flat by an invisible blast.
+
+It was a picnic lunch served on board trestles under a tree behind the
+cover of a straw-roofed shelter tent, and we ate it in quite a peaceful
+and cozy picnic fashion.  Twice during the meal an orderly came with a
+message which he had taken off a field telephone in a little pigsty of
+logs and straw fifty feet away from us; but the general each time merely
+canted his head to hear what the whispered word might be and went on
+eating.  There was no clattering in of couriers, no hurried dispatching
+of orders this way and that.  Only, just before we finished with the
+meal, he got up and walked away a few paces, and there two of his aides
+joined him and the three of them confabbed together earnestly for a
+couple of minutes or so.  While so engaged they had the air about them
+of surgeons preparing to undertake an operation and first consulting
+over the preliminary details.  Or perhaps it would be truer to say they
+looked like civil engineers discussing the working-out of an undertaking
+regarding which there was interest but no uneasiness. Assuredly they
+behaved not in the least as a general and aides would behave in a story
+book or on the stage, and when they were through they came back for
+their coffee and their cigars to the table where the rest of us sat.
+
+"We are going now to a battery of the twenty-one-centimeter guns and
+from there to the ten-centimeters," called out Lieutenant Geibel as we
+climbed aboard our cars; "and when we pass that first group of houses
+yonder we shall be under fire.  So if you have wills to make, you
+American gentlemen, you should be making them now before we start." A
+gay young officer was Lieutenant Geibel, and he just naturally would
+have his little joke whether or no.
+
+Immediately then and twice again that day we were technically presumed
+to be under fire--I use the word technically advisedly--and again the
+next day and once again two days thereafter before Antwerp, but I was
+never able to convince myself that it was so. Certainly there was no
+sense of actual danger as we sped through the empty single street of a
+despoiled and tenantless village.  All about us were the marks of what
+the shellfire had done, some fresh and still smoking, some old and dry-
+charred, but no shells dropped near us as we circled in a long swing up
+to within half a mile of the first line of German trenches and perhaps a
+mile to the left of them.
+
+Thereby we arrived safely and very speedily and without mishap at a
+battery of twenty-one-centimeter guns, standing in a gnawed sheep
+pasture behind an abandoned farmhouse, what was left of a farmhouse,
+which was to say very little of it indeed.  The guns stood in a row, and
+each one of them--there were five in all--stared with its single round
+eye at the blue sky where the sky showed above a thick screen of tall
+slim poplars growing on the far side of the farmyard.  We barely had
+time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in
+the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to
+lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from
+the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the
+sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were
+tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them
+from bogging down in miry places--I say we barely had time to note these
+details mentally when things began to happen. There was a large and much
+be-mired soldier who spraddled face downward upon his belly in one of
+the straw-lined dugouts with his ear hitched to a telephone.  Without
+lifting his head or turning it he sang out.  At that all the other men
+sprang up very promptly. Before, they had been sprawled about in sunny
+places, smoking and sleeping, and writing on postcards.  Postcards,
+butter and beer--these are the German private's luxuries, but most of
+all postcards.  The men bestirred themselves.
+
+"You are in luck, gentlemen," said the lieutenant.  "This battery has
+been idle all day, but now it is to begin firing.  The order to fire
+just came.  The balloon operator, who is in communication with the
+observation pits beyond the foremost infantry trenches, will give the
+range and the distance.  Listen, please." He held up his hand for
+silence, intent on hearing what the man at the telephone was repeating
+back over the line.  "Ah, that's it--5400 meters straight over the tree
+tops."
+
+He waved us together into a more compact group.  "That's the idea.
+Stand here, please, behind Number One gun, and watch straight ahead of
+you for the shot--you must watch very closely or you will miss it--and
+remember to keep your mouth open to save your eardrums from being
+injured by the concussion."
+
+So far as I personally was concerned this last bit of advice was
+unnecessary--my mouth was open already.  Four men trotted to a magazine
+that was in an earthen kennel and came back bearing a wheelless sheet-
+metal barrow on which rested a three-foot-long brass shell, very trim
+and slim and handsome and shiny like gold.  It was an expensive-looking
+shell and quite ornate.  At the tail of Number One the bearers heaved
+the barrow up shoulder-high, at the same time tilting it forward.  Then
+a round vent opened magically and the cyclops sucked the morsel forward
+into its gullet, thus reversing the natural swallowing process, and
+smacked its steel lip behind it with a loud and greasy snuck! A glutton
+of a gun--you could tell that from the sound it made.
+
+A lieutenant snapped out something, a sergeant snapped it back to him,
+the gun crew jumped aside, balancing themselves on tiptoe with their
+mouths all agape, and the gun-firer either pulled a lever out or else
+pushed one home, I couldn't tell which.  Then everything--sky and woods
+and field and all--fused and ran together in a great spatter of red
+flame and white smoke, and the earth beneath our feet shivered and shook
+as the twenty-one-centimeter spat out its twenty-one-centimeter
+mouthful.  A vast obscenity of sound beat upon us, making us reel
+backward, and for just the one-thousandth part of a second I saw a round
+white spot, like a new baseball, against a cloud background.  The
+poplars, which had bent forward as if before a quick wind-squall, stood
+up, trembling in their tops, and we dared to breathe again.  Then each
+in its turn the other four guns spoke, profaning the welkin, and we
+rocked on our heels like drunken men, and I remember there was a queer
+taste, as of something burned, in my mouth.  All of which was very fine,
+no doubt, and very inspiring, too, if one cared deeply for that sort of
+thing; but to myself, when the hemisphere had ceased from its
+quiverings, I said:
+
+"It isn't true--this isn't war; it's just a costly, useless game of
+playing at war.  Behold, now, these guns did not fire at anybody visible
+or anything tangible.  They merely elevated their muzzles into the sky
+and fired into the sky to make a great tumult and spoil the good air
+with a bad-tasting smoke.  No enemy is in sight and no enemy will answer
+back; therefore no enemy exists.  It is all a useless and a fussy
+business, signifying nothing."
+
+Nor did any enemy answer back.  The guns having been fired with due pomp
+and circumstance, the gunners went back to those pipe-smoking and
+postcard-writing pursuits of theirs and everything was as before--
+peaceful and entirely serene.  Only the telephone man remained in his
+bed in the straw with his ear at his telephone.  He was still couched
+there, spraddling ridiculously on his stomach, with his legs
+outstretched in a sawbuck pattern, as we came away.
+
+"It isn't always quite so quiet hereabouts," said the lieutenant.  "The
+commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped
+some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two.  Perhaps things
+will be brisker at the ten-centimeter-gun battery." He spoke as one who
+regretted that the show which he offered was not more exciting.
+
+The twenty-one-centimeters, as I have told you, were in the edge of the
+woods, with leafy ambushes about them, but the little ten-centimeter
+guns ranged themselves quite boldly in a meadow of rank long grass just
+under the weather-rim of a small hill.  They were buried to their
+haunches--if a field gun may be said to have haunches--in depressions
+gouged out by their own frequent recoils; otherwise they were without
+concealment of any sort.  To reach them we rode a mile or two and then
+walked a quarter of a mile through a series of chalky bare gullies, and
+our escorts made us stoop low and hurry fast wherever the path wound up
+to the crest of the bank, lest our figures, being outlined against the
+sky, should betray our whereabouts and, what was more important, the
+whereabouts of the battery to the sharpshooters in the French rifle pits
+forward of the French infantry trenches and not exceeding a mile from
+us.
+
+We stopped first at an observation station cunningly hidden in a haw
+thicket on the brow of a steep and heavily wooded defile overlooking the
+right side of the river valley---the river, however, being entirely out
+of sight.  Standing here we heard the guns speak apparently from almost
+beneath our feet, and three or four seconds thereafter we saw five
+little puffballs of white smoke uncurling above a line of trees across
+the valley. Somebody said this was our battery shelling the French and
+English in those woods yonder, but you could hardly be expected to
+believe that, since no reply came back and no French or English
+whatsoever showed themselves.  Altogether it seemed a most impotent and
+impersonal proceeding; and when the novelty of waiting for the blast of
+sound and then watching for the smoke plumes to appear had worn off, as
+it very soon did, we visited the guns themselves.  They were not under
+our feet at all.  They were some two hundred yards away, across a field
+where the telephone wires stretched over the old plow furrows and
+through the rank meadow grass, like springs to catch woodcock.
+
+Here again the trick of taking a message off the telephone and shouting
+it forth from the mouth of a fox burrow was repeated.  Whenever this
+procedure came to pass a sergeant who had strained his vocal cords from
+much giving of orders would swell out his chest and throw back his head
+and shriek hoarsely with what was left of his voice, which wasn't much.
+This meant a fury of noise resulting instantly and much white smoke to
+follow.  For a while the guns were fired singly and then they were fired
+in salvos; and you might mark how the grass for fifty yards in front of
+the muzzles would lie on the earth quite flat and then stand erect, and
+how the guns, like shying bronchos, would leap backward upon their
+carriages and then slide forward again as the air in the air cushions
+took up the kick.  Also we took note that the crews of the ten-
+centimeters had built for themselves dugouts to sleep in and to live in,
+and had covered the sod roofs over with straw and broken tree limbs.  We
+judged they would be very glad indeed to crawl into those same shelters
+when night came, for they had been serving the guns all day and plainly
+were about as weary as men could be.  To burn powder hour after hour and
+day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom
+you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober,
+uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about
+themselves--the ghastly unreality of the proposition left me mentally
+numbed.
+
+Howsoever, we arrived not long after that at a field hospital--namely,
+Field Hospital Number 36, and here was realism enough to satisfy the
+lexicographer who first coined the word.  This field hospital was
+established in eight abandoned houses of the abandoned small French
+village of Colligis, and all eight houses were crowded with wounded men
+lying as closely as they could lie upon mattresses placed side by side
+on the floors, with just room to step between the mattresses.  Be it
+remembered also that these were all men too seriously wounded to be
+moved even to a point as close as Laon; those more lightly injured than
+these were already carried back to the main hospitals.
+
+We went into one room containing only men suffering from chest wounds,
+who coughed and wheezed and constantly fought off the swarming flies
+that assailed them, and into another room given over entirely to
+brutally abbreviated human fragments--fractional parts of men who had
+lost their arms or legs.  On the far mattress against the wall lay a
+little pale German with his legs gone below the knees, who smiled upward
+at the ceiling and was quite chipper.
+
+"A wonderful man, that little chap," said one of the surgeons to me.
+"When they first brought him here two weeks ago I said to him: 'It's
+hard on you that you should lose both your feet,' and he looked up at me
+and grinned and said: 'Herr Doctor, it might have been worse.  It might
+have been my hands--and me a tailor by trade!'"
+
+This surgeon told us he had an American wife, and he asked me to bear a
+message for him to his wife's people in the States.  So if these lines
+should come to the notice of Mrs. Rosamond Harris, who lives at
+Hinesburg, Vermont, she may know that her son-in-law, Doctor Schilling,
+was at last accounts very busy and very well, although coated with white
+dust--face, head and eyebrows--so that he reminded me of a clown in a
+pantomime, and dyed as to his hands with iodine to an extent that made
+his fingers look like pieces of well-cured meerschaum.
+
+They were bringing in more men, newly wounded that day, as we came out
+of Doctor Schilling's improvised operating room in the little village
+schoolhouse, and one of the litter bearers was a smart-faced little
+London Cockney, a captured English ambulance-hand, who wore a German
+soldier's cap to save him from possible annoyance as he went about his
+work.  Not very many wounded had arrived since the morning--it was a
+dull day for them, the surgeons said--but I took note that, when the Red
+Cross men put down a canvas stretcher upon the courtyard flags and
+shortly thereafter took it up again, it left a broad red smear where it
+rested against the flat stones.  Also this stretcher and all the other
+stretchers had been so sagged by the weight of bodies that they
+threatened to rip from the frames, and so stained by that which had
+stained them that the canvas was as stiff as though it had been
+varnished and revarnished with many coats of brown shellac.  But it
+wasn't shellac.  There is just one fluid which leaves that brown, hard
+coating when it dries upon woven cloth.
+
+As I recall now we had come through the gate of the schoolhouse to where
+the automobiles stood when a puff of wind, blowing to us from the left,
+which meant from across the battlefront, brought to our noses a certain
+smell which we already knew full well.
+
+"You get it, I see," said the German officer who stood alongside me.
+"It comes from three miles off, but you can get it five miles distant
+when the wind is strong.  That"--and he waved his left arm toward it as
+though the stench had been a visible thing--"that explains why tobacco
+is so scarce with us among the staff back yonder in Laon.  All the
+tobacco which can be spared is sent to the men in the front trenches.
+As long as they smoke and keep on smoking they can stand--that!
+
+"You see," he went on painstakingly, "the situation out there at Cerny
+is like this: The French and English, but mainly the English, held the
+ground firSt. We drove them back and they lost very heavily.  In places
+their trenches were actually full of dead and dying men when we took
+those trenches.
+
+"You could have buried them merely by filling up the trenches with
+earth.  And that old beet-sugar factory which you saw this noon when we
+were at field headquarters--it was crowded with badly wounded
+Englishmen.
+
+"At once they rallied and forced us back, and now it was our turn to
+lose heavily.  That was nearly three weeks ago, and since then the
+ground over which we fought has been debatable ground, lying between our
+lines and the enemy's lines--a stretch four miles long and half a mile
+wide that is literally carpeted with bodies of dead men.  They weren't
+all dead at first. For two days and nights our men in the earthworks
+heard the cries of those who still lived, and the sound of them almost
+drove them mad.  There was no reaching the wounded, though, either from
+our lines or from the Allies' lines.  Those who tried to reach them were
+themselves killed.  Now there are only dead out there--thousands of
+dead, I think.  And they have been there twenty days.  Once in a while a
+shell strikes that old sugar mill or falls into one of those trenches.
+Then--well, then, it is worse for those who serve in the front lines."
+
+"But in the name of God, man," I said, "why don't they call a truce--
+both sides--and put that horror underground?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"War is different now," he said.  "Truces are out of fashion."
+
+I stood there and I smelled that smell.  And I thought of all those
+flies, and those blood-stiffened stretchers, and those little inch-long
+figures which I myself, looking through that telescope, had seen lying
+on the green hill, and those automobiles loaded with mangled men, and
+War de Luxe betrayed itself to me.  Beneath its bogus glamour I saw war
+for what it is--the next morning of drunken glory.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 12
+
+The Rut of Big Guns in France
+
+
+Let me say at the outset of this chapter that I do not set up as one
+professing to have any knowledge whatsoever of so-called military
+science.  The more I have seen of the carrying-on of the actual business
+of war, the less able do I seem to be to understand the meanings of the
+business.  For me strategy remains a closed book.  Even the simplest
+primary lessons of it, the A B C's of it, continue to impress me as
+being stupid, but none the less unplumbable mysteries.
+
+The physical aspects of campaigning I can in a way grasp.  At least I
+flatter myself that I can.  A man would have to be deaf and dumb and
+blind not to grasp them, did they reveal themselves before him as they
+have revealed themselves before me.  Indeed, if he preserved only the
+faculty of scent unimpaired he might still be able to comprehend the
+thing, since, as I have said before, war in its commoner phases is not
+so much a sight as a great bad smell.  As for the rudiments of the
+system which dictates the movements of troops in large masses or in
+small, which sacrifices thousands of men to take a town or hold a river
+when that town and that river, physically considered, appear to be of no
+consequence whatsoever, those elements I have not been able to sense,
+even though I studied the matter most diligently.  So after sundry
+months of first-hand observation in one of the theaters of hostilities,
+I tell myself that the trade of fighting is a trade to be learned by
+slow and laborious degrees, and even then may be learned with
+thoroughness only by one who has a natural aptitude for it.  Either
+that, or else I am most extraordinarily thick-headed, for I own that I
+am still as complete a greenhorn now as I was at the beginning.
+
+Having made the confession which is said to be good for the soul, and
+which in any event has the merit of blunting in advance the critical
+judgments of the expert, since he must pity my ignorance and my
+innocence even though he quarrel with my conclusions, I now assume the
+role of prophet long enough to venture to say that the day of the modern
+walled fort is over and done with.  I do not presume to speak regarding
+coast defenses maintained for the purposes of repelling attacks or
+invasions from the sea.  I am speaking with regard to land defenses
+which are assailable by land forces.  I believe in the future great
+wars--if indeed there are to be any more great wars following after this
+one--that the nations involved, instead of buttoning their frontiers
+down with great fortresses and ringing their principal cities about with
+circles of protecting works, will put their trust more and more in
+transportable cannon of a caliber and a projecting force greater than
+any yet built or planned.  I make this assertion after viewing the
+visible results of the operations of the German 42-centimeter guns in
+Belgium and France, notably at Liege in the former country and at
+Maubeuge in the latter.
+
+Except for purposes of frightening non-combatants the Zeppelins
+apparently have proved of most dubious value; nor, barring its value as
+a scout--a field in which it is of marvelous efficiency--does the
+aeroplane appear to have been of much consequence in inflicting loss
+upon the enemy.  Of the comparatively new devices for waging war, the
+submarine and the great gun alone seem to have justified in any great
+degree the hopes of their sponsors.
+
+Since I came back out of the war zone I have met persons who questioned
+the existence of a 42-centimeter gun, they holding it to be a nightmare
+created out of the German imagination with intent to break the
+confidence of the enemies of Germany.  I did not see a 42-centimeter gun
+with my own eyes, and personally I doubt whether the Germans had as many
+of them as they claimed to have; but I talked with one entirely reliable
+witness, an American consular officer, who saw a 42-centimeter gun as it
+was being transported to the front in the opening week of the war, and
+with another American, a diplomat of high rank, who interviewed a man
+who saw one of these guns, and who in detailing the conversation to me
+said the spectator had been literally stunned by the size and length and
+the whole terrific contour of the monster.
+
+Finally, I know from personal experience that these guns have been
+employed, and employed with a result that goes past adequate
+description; but if I hadn't seen the effect of their fire I wouldn't
+have believed it were true.  I wouldn't have believed anything evolved
+out of the brains of men and put together by the fingers of men could
+operate with such devilish accuracy to compass such utter destruction.
+I would have said it was some planetic force, some convulsion of natural
+forces, and not an agency of human devisement, that turned Fort Loncin
+inside out, and transformed it within a space of hours from a supposedly
+impregnable stronghold into a hodgepodge of complete and hideous
+ruination.  And what befell Fort Loncin on the hills behind Liege befell
+Fort Des Sarts outside of Maubeuge, as I have reason to know.  When the
+first of the 42-centimeters emerged from Essen it took a team of thirty
+horses to haul it; and with it out of that nest of the Prussian war
+eagle came also a force of mechanics and engineers to set it up and aim
+it and fire it.
+
+Here, too, is an interesting fact that I have not seen printed anywhere,
+though I heard it often enough in Germany: by reason of its bulk the 42-
+centimeter must be mounted upon a concrete base before it can be used.
+Heretofore the concrete which was available for this purpose required at
+least a fortnight of exposure before it was sufficiently firm and
+hardened; but when Fraulein Bertha Krupp's engineers escorted the
+Fraulein's newest and most impressive steel masterpiece to the war, they
+brought along with them the ingredients for a new kind of concrete; and
+those who claim to have been present on the occasion declare that within
+forty-eight hours after they had mixed and molded it, it was ready to
+bear the weight of the guns and withstand the shock of their recoil.
+
+This having been done, I conceive of the operators as hoisting their
+guns into position, and posting up a set of rules--even in time of war
+it is impossible to imagine the Germans doing anything of importance
+without a set of rules to go by--and working out the distance by
+mathematics, and then turning loose their potential cataclysms upon the
+stubborn forts which opposed their further progress.  From the viewpoint
+of the Germans the consequences to the foe must amply have justified the
+trouble and the cost. For where a 42-centimeter shell falls it does more
+than merely alter landscape; almost you might say it alters geography.
+
+In the open field, where he must aim his gun with his own eye and
+discharge it with his own finger, I take it the Kaiser's private soldier
+is no great shakes as a marksman.  The Germans themselves begrudgingly
+admitted the French excelled them in the use of light artillery.  There
+was wonderment as well as reluctance in this concession.  To them it
+seemed well-nigh incredible that any nation should be their superiors in
+any department pertaining to the practice of war.  They could not bring
+themselves fully to understand it.  It remained as much a puzzle to them
+as the unaccountable obstinacy of the English in refusing to be budged
+out of their position by displays of cold steel, or to be shaken by the
+volleying, bull-like roar of the German charging cry, which at first the
+Germans counted upon as being almost as efficacious as the bayonet for
+instilling a wholesome fear of the German war god into the souls of
+their foes.
+
+While giving the Frenchmen credit for knowing how to handle and serve
+small field-pieces, the Germans nevertheless insisted that their
+infantry fire or their skirmish fire was as deadly as that of the
+Allies, or even deadlier.  This I was not prepared to believe.  I do not
+think the German is a good rifle shot by instinct, as the American often
+is, and in a lesser degree, perhaps, the Englishman is, too.  But where
+he can work the range out on paper, where he has to do with mechanics
+instead of a shifting mark, where he can apply to the details of gun
+firing the exact principles of arithmetic, I am pretty sure the German
+is as good a gunner as may be found on the Continent of Europe to-day.
+This may not apply to him at sea, for he has neither the sailor
+traditions nor the inherited naval craftsmanship of the English; but
+judging by what I have seen I am quite certain that with the solid earth
+beneath him and a set of figures before him and an enemy out of sight of
+him to be damaged he is in a class all by himself.
+
+A German staff officer, who professed to have been present, told me that
+at Manonvilla--so he spelled the name--a 42-centimeter gun was fired
+one hundred and forty-seven times from a distance of 14,000 meters at a
+fort measuring 600 meters in length by 400 meters in breadth--a very
+small target, indeed, considering the range--and that investigation
+after the capture of the fort showed not a single one of the one hundred
+and forty-seven shots had been an outright miss.  Some few, he said, hit
+the walls or at the bases of the walls, but all the others, he claimed,
+had bull's-eyed into the fort itself.
+
+Subsequently, on subjecting this tale to the acid test of second thought
+I was compelled to doubt what the staff officer had said.  To begin
+with, I didn't understand how a 42-centimeter gun could be fired one
+hundred and forty-seven times without its wearing out, for I have often
+heard that the larger the bore of your gun and the heavier the charge of
+explosives which it carries, the shorter is its period of efficiency..
+In the second place, it didn't seem possible after being hit one hundred
+and forty-seven times with 42-centimeter bombs that enough of any fort
+of whatsoever size would be left to permit of a tallying-up of separate
+shots.  Ten shots properly placed should have razed it; twenty more
+should have blown its leveled remainder to powder and scattered the
+powder.
+
+Be the facts what they may with regard to this case of the fort of
+Manonvilla--if that be its proper name--I am prepared to speak with the
+assurance of an eyewitness concerning the effect of the German fire upon
+the defenses of Maubeuge.  What I saw at Liege I have described in a
+previous chapter of this volume.  What I saw at Maubeuge was even more
+convincing testimony, had I needed it, that the Germans had a 42-
+centimeter gun, and that, given certain favored conditions, they knew
+how to handle it effectively.
+
+We spent the better part of a day in two of the forts which were fondly
+presumed to guard Maubeuge toward the north--Fort Des Sarts and Fort
+Boussois; but Fort Des Sarts was the one where the 42-centimeter gun
+gave the first exhibition of its powers upon French soil in this war, so
+we went there first. To reach it we ran a matter of seven kilometers
+through a succession of villages, each with its mutely eloquent tale of
+devastation and general smash to tell; each with its group of
+contemptuously tolerant German soldiers on guard and its handful of
+natives, striving feebly to piece together the broken and bankrupt
+fragments of their worldly affairs.
+
+Approaching Des Sarts more nearly we came to a longish stretch of
+highway, which the French had cleared of visual obstructions in
+anticipation of resistance by infantry in the event that the outer ring
+of defenses gave way before the German bombardment.  It had all been
+labor in vain, for the town capitulated after the outposts fell; but it
+must have been very great labor.  Any number of fine elm trees had been
+felled and their boughs, stripped now of leaves, stuck up like bare
+bones.  There were holes in the metaled road where misaimed shells had
+descended, and in any one of these holes you might have buried a horse.
+A little gray church stood off by itself upon the plain.  It had been
+homely enough to start with.  Now with its steeple shorn away and one of
+its two belfry windows obliterated by a straying shot it had a rakish,
+cock-eyed look to it.
+
+Just beyond where the church was our chauffeur halted the car in
+obedience to an order from the staff officer who had been detailed by
+Major von Abercron, commandant of Maubeuge, to accompany us on this
+particular excursion.  Our guide pointed off to the right.  "There," he
+said, "is where we dropped the first of our big ones when we were trying
+to get the range of the fort.  You see our guns were posted at a point
+between eight and nine kilometers away and at the start we overshot a
+trifle.  Still to the garrison yonder it must have been an unhappy
+foretaste of what they might shortly expect, when they saw the forty-
+twos striking here in this field and saw what execution they did among
+the cabbage and the beet patches."
+
+We left the car and, following our guide, went to look.  Spaced very
+neatly at intervals apart of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards a series
+of craters broke the surface of the earth.  Considering the tools which
+dug them they were rather symmetrical craters, not jagged and gouged,
+but with smooth walls and each in shape a perfect funnel.  We measured
+roughly a typical specimen.  Across the top it was between fifty and
+sixty feet in diameter, and it sloped down evenly for a depth of
+eighteen feet in the chalky soil to a pointed bottom, where two men
+would have difficulty standing together without treading upon each
+other's toes.  Its sides were lined with loose pellets of earth of the
+average size of a tennis ball, and when we slid down into the hole these
+rounded clods accompanied us in small avalanches.
+
+We were filled with astonishment, first, that an explosive grenade,
+weighing upward of a ton, could be so constructed that it would
+penetrate thus far into firm and solid earth before it exploded; and,
+second, that it could make such a neat saucer of a hole when it did
+explode.  But there was a still more amazing thing to be pondered.  Of
+the earth which had been dispossessed from the crevasse, amounting to a
+great many wagonloads, no sign remained.  It was not heaped up about the
+lips of the funnel; it was not visibly scattered over the nearermost
+furrows of that truck field.  So far as we might tell it was utterly
+gone; and from that we deduced that the force of the explosion had been
+sufficient to pulverize the clay so finely and cast it so far and so
+wide that it fell upon the surface in a fine shower, leaving no traces
+unless one made a minute search for it. Noting the wonder upon our
+faces, the officer was moved to speak further in a tone of sincere
+admiration, touching on the capabilities of the crowning achievement of
+the Krupp works:
+
+"Pretty strong medicine, eh? Well, wait until I have shown you American
+gentlemen what remains of the fort; then you will better understand.
+Even here, out in the open, for a radius of a hundred and fifty meters,
+any man, conceding he wasn't killed outright, would be knocked senseless
+and after that for hours, even for days, perhaps, he would be entirely
+unnerved.  The force of the concussion appears to have that effect upon
+persons who are at a considerable distance--it rips their nerves to
+tatters.  Some seem numbed and dazed; others develop an acute
+hysteria.
+
+"Highly interesting, is it not? Listen then; here is something even more
+interesting: Within an inclosed space, where there is a roof to hold in
+the gas generated by the explosion or where there are reasonably high
+walls, the man who escapes being torn apart in the instant of impact, or
+who escapes being crushed to death by collapsing masonry, or killed by
+flying fragments, is exceedingly likely to choke to death as he lies
+temporarily paralyzed and helpless from the shock.  I was at Liege and
+again here, and I know from my own observations that this is true.  At
+Liege particularly many of the garrison were caught and penned up in
+underground casements, and there we found them afterward dead, but with
+no marks of wounds upon them--they had been asphyxiated."
+
+I suppose in times of peace the speaker was a reasonably kind man and
+reasonably regardful of the rights of his fellowmen.  Certainly he was
+most courteous to us and most considerate; but he described this
+slaughter-pit scene with the enthusiasm of one who was a partner in a
+most creditable and worthy enterprise.
+
+Immediately about Des Sarts stood many telegraph poles in a row, for
+here the road, which was the main road from Paris to Brussels, curved
+close up under the grass-covered bastions.  All the telegraph wires had
+been cut, and they dangled about the bases of the poles in snarled
+tangles like love vines.  The ditches paralleling the road were choked
+with felled trees, and, what with the naked limbs, were as spiky as shad
+spines.  Of the small cottages which once had stood in the vicinity of
+the fort not one remained standing.  Their sites were marked by
+flattened heaps of brick and plaster from which charred ends of rafters
+protruded.  It was as though a giant had sat himself down upon each
+little house in turn and squashed it to the foundation stones.
+
+As a fort Des Sarts dated back to 1883.  I speak of it in the past
+tense, because the Germans had put it in that tense.  As a fort, or as
+anything resembling a fort, it had ceased to be, absolutely.  The inner
+works of it--the redan and the underground barracks, and the magazines,
+and all--were built after the style .followed by military engineers back
+in 1883, having revetments faced up with brick and stone; but only a
+little while ago--in the summer of 1913, to be exact--the job of
+inclosing the original works with a glacis of a newer type had been
+completed.  So when the Germans came along in the first week of
+September it was in most respects made over into a modern fort.  No
+doubt the re-enforcements of reserves that hurried into it to strengthen
+the regular garrison counted themselves lucky men to have so massive and
+stout a shelter from which to fight an enemy who must work in the open
+against them.  Poor devils, their hopes crumbled along with their walls
+when the Germans brought up the forty-twos.
+
+We entered in through a breach in the first parapet and crossed, one at
+a time, on a tottery wooden bridge which was propped across a fosse half
+full of rubble, and so came to what had been the heart of the fort of
+Des Sarts.  Had I not already gathered some notion of the powers for
+destruction of those one-ton, four-foot-long shells, I should have said
+that the spot where we halted had been battered and crashed at for
+hours; that scores and perhaps hundreds of bombs had been plumped into
+it.  Now, though, I was prepared to believe the German captain when he
+said probably not more than five or six of the devil devices had struck
+this target.  Make it six for good measure.  Conceive each of the six as
+having been dammed by a hurricane and sired by an earthquake, and as
+being related to an active volcano on one side of the family and to a
+flaming meteor on the other.  Conceive it as falling upon a man-made,
+masonry-walled burrow in the earth and being followed in rapid
+succession by five of its blood brethren; then you will begin to get
+some fashion of mental photograph of the result.  I confess myself as
+unable to supply any better suggestion for a comparison.  Nor shall I
+attempt to describe the picture in any considerable detail.  I only know
+that for the first time in my life I realized the full and adequate
+meaning of the word chaos.  The proper definition of it was spread
+broadcast before my eyes.
+
+Appreciating the impossibility of comprehending the full scope of the
+disaster which here had befallen, or of putting it concretely into words
+if I did comprehend it, I sought to pick out small individual details,
+which was hard to do, too, seeing that all things were jumbled together
+so.  This had been a series of cunningly buried tunnels and arcades,
+with cozy subterranean dormitories opening off of side passages, and
+still farther down there had been magazines and storage spaces.  Now it
+was all a hole in the ground, and the force which blasted it out had
+then pulled the hole in behind itself.  We stood on the verge, looking
+downward into a chasm which seemed to split its way to infinite depths,
+although in fact it was probably not nearly so deep as it appeared.  If
+we looked upward there, forty feet above our heads, was a wide riven gap
+in the earth crust.
+
+Near me I discerned a litter of metal fragments.  From such of the
+scraps as retained any shape at all, I figured that they had been part
+of the protective casing of a gun mounted somewhere above.  The missile
+which wrecked the gun flung its armor down here.  I searched my brain
+for a simile which might serve to give a notion of the present state of
+that steel jacket.  I didn't find the one I wanted, but if you will
+think of an earthenware pot which has been thrown from a very high
+building upon a brick sidewalk you may have some idea of what I saw.
+
+At that, it was no completer a ruin than any of the surrounding debris.
+Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained
+recognizably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed frames
+bolted to the back wall of what I think must have been a barrack room
+for officers.  The room itself was no longer there.  Brick, mortar,
+stone, concrete, steel reinforcements, iron props, the hard-packed
+earth, had been ripped out and churned into indistinguishable bits, but
+those two iron beds hung fast to a discolored patch of plastering,
+though the floor was gone from beneath them. Seemingly they were hardly
+damaged.  One gathered that a 42-centimeter shell possessed in some
+degree the freakishness which we associate with the behavior of
+cyclones.
+
+We were told that at the last, when the guns had been silenced and
+dismounted and the walls had been pierced and the embrasures blown
+bodily away, the garrison, or what was left of it, fled to these
+lowermost shelters.  But the burrowing bombs found the refugees out and
+killed them, nearly all, and those of them who died were still buried
+beneath our feet in as hideous a sepulcher as ever was digged.  There
+was no getting them out from that tomb.  The Crack of Doom will find
+them still there, I guess.
+
+To reach a portion of Des Sarts, as yet un-visited, we skirted the gape
+of the crater, climbing over craggy accumulations of wreckage, and
+traversed a tunnel with an arched roof and mildewed brick walls, like a
+wine vault.  The floor of it was littered with the knapsacks and water
+bottles of dead or captured men, with useless rifles broken at the
+stocks and bent in the barrels, and with suchlike riffle.  At the far
+end of the passage we came out into the open at the back side of the
+fort.
+
+"Right here," said the officer who was piloting us, "I witnessed a sight
+which made a deeper impression upon me than anything I have seen in this
+campaign.  After the white flag had been hoisted by the survivors and we
+had marched in, I halted my men just here at the entrance to this
+arcade.  We didn't dare venture into the redan, for sporadic explosions
+were still occurring in the ammunition stores.  Also there were fires
+raging. Smoke was pouring thickly out of the mouth of the tunnel.  It
+didn't seem possible that there could be anyone alive back yonder.
+
+"All of a sudden, men began to come out of the tunnel.  They came and
+came until there were nearly two hundred of them--French reservists
+mostly.  They were crazy men--crazy for the time being, and still crazy,
+I expect, some of them.  They came out staggering, choking, falling down
+and getting up again.  You see, their nerves were gone. The fumes, the
+gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they had
+escaped--all these had distracted them.  They danced, sang, wept,
+laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously
+until they dropped.  They were deafened, and some of them could not see
+but had to grope their way.  I remember one man who sat down and pulled
+off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his
+bare feet until he cut the bottoms of them to pieces.  I don't care to
+see anything like that again--even if it is my enemies that suffer it."
+
+He told it so vividly, that standing alongside of him before the tunnel
+opening I could see the procession myself--those two hundred men who had
+drained horror to its lees and were drunk on it.
+
+We went to Fort Boussois, some four miles away.  It was another of the
+keys to the town. It was taken on September sixth; on the next day,
+September seventh, the citadel surrendered.  Here, in lieu of the 42-
+centimeter, which was otherwise engaged for the moment, the attacking
+forces brought into play an Austrian battery of 30-centimeter guns.  So
+far as I have been able to ascertain this was the only Austrian command
+which had any part in the western campaigns.  The Austrian gunners
+shelled the fort until the German infantry had been massed in a forest
+to the northward.  Late in the afternoon the infantry charged across a
+succession of cleared fields and captured the outer slopes. With these
+in their possession it didn't take them very long to compel the
+surrender of Fort Boussois, especially as the defenders had already been
+terribly cut up by the artillery fire.
+
+The Austrians must have been first-rate marksmen.  One of their shells
+fell squarely upon the rounded dome of a big armored turret which was
+sunk in the earth and chipped off the top of it as you would chip your
+breakfast egg.  The men who manned the guns in that revolving turret
+must all have died in a flash of time.  The impact of the blow was such
+that the leaden solder which filled the interstices of the segments of
+the turret was squeezed out from between the plates in curly strips,
+like icing from between the layers of a misused birthday cake.
+
+Back within the main works we saw where a shell had bored a smooth,
+round orifice through eight meters of earth and a meter and a half of
+concrete and steel plates. Peering into the shaft we could make out the
+floor of a tunnel some thirty feet down.  To judge by its effects, this
+shell had been of a different type from any others whose work we had
+witnessed.  Apparently it had been devised to excavate holes rather than
+to explode, and when we asked questions about it we speedily ascertained
+that our guide did not care to discuss the gun which had inflicted this
+particular bit of damage.
+
+"It is not permitted to speak of this matter," he said in explanation of
+his attitude.  "It is a military secret, this invention.  We call it a
+mine gun."
+
+Every man to his taste.  I should have called it a well-digger.
+
+Erect upon the highest stretch of riddled walls, with his legs spraddled
+far apart and his arms jerking in expressive gestures, he told us how
+the German infantry had advanced across the open ground.  It had been
+hard, he said, to hold the men back until the order for the charge was
+given, and then they burst from their cover and came on at a dead run,
+cheering.
+
+"It was very fine," he added.  "Very glorious."
+
+"Did you have any losses in the charge?" asked one of our party.
+
+"Oh, yes," he answered, as though that part of the proceeding was purely
+an incidental detail and of no great consequence.  "We lost many men
+here--very many--several thousands, I think.  Most of them are buried
+where you see those long ridges in the second field beyond."
+
+In a sheltered corner of a redoubt, close up under a parapet and
+sheathed on its inner side with masonry, was a single grave.  The
+pounding feet of many fighting men had beaten the mound flat, but a
+small wooden cross still stood in the soil, and on it in French were
+penciled the words:
+
+"Here lies Lieutenant Verner, killed in the charge of battle."
+
+His men must have thought well of the lieutenant to take the time, in
+the midst of the defense, to bury him in the place where he fell, for
+there were no other graves to be seen within the fort.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 13
+
+Those Yellow Pine Boxes
+
+
+It was late in the short afternoon, and getting close on to twilight,
+when we got back into the town.  Except for the soldiers there was
+little life stirring in the twisting streets.  There was a funeral or so
+in progress.  It seemed to us that always, no matter where we stopped,
+in whatsoever town or at whatsoever hour, some dead soldier was being
+put away.  Still, I suppose we shouldn't have felt any surprise at that.
+By now half of Europe was one great funeral.  Part of it was on crutches
+and part of it was in the graveyard and the rest of it was in the field.
+
+Daily in these towns back behind the firing lines a certain percentage
+of the invalided and the injured, who had been brought thus far before
+their condition became actually serious, would die; and twice daily, or
+oftener, the dead would be buried with military honors.
+
+So naturally we were eyewitnesses to a great many of these funerals.
+Somehow they impressed me more than the sight of dead men being
+hurriedly shoveled under ground on the battle front where they had
+fallen.  Perhaps it was the consciousness that those who had these
+formal, separate burials were men who came alive out of the fighting,
+and who, even after being stricken, had a chance for life and then lost
+it.  Perhaps it was the small show of ceremony and ritual which marked
+each one--the firing squad, the clergyman in his robes, the tramping
+escort--that left so enduring an impress upon my mind.  I did not try to
+analyze the reasons; but I know my companions felt as I did.
+
+I remember quite distinctly the very first of these funerals that I
+witnessed.  Possibly I remember it with such distinctness because it was
+the firSt. On our way to the advance positions of the Germans we had
+come as far as Chimay, which is an old Belgian town just over the
+frontier from France.  I was sitting on a bench just outside the doorway
+of a parochial school conducted by nuns, which had been taken over by
+the conquerors and converted into a temporary receiving hospital for men
+who were too seriously wounded to stand the journey up into Germany.
+All the surgeons on duty here were Germans, but the nursing force was
+about equally divided between nuns and Lutheran deaconesses who had been
+brought overland for this duty.  Also there were several volunteer
+nurses--the wife of an officer, a wealthy widow from Dusseldorf and a
+school-teacher from Coblenz among them.  Catholic and Protestant,
+Belgian and French and German, they all labored together, cheerfully and
+earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant
+sorts.
+
+One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex
+officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a
+slightly wounded major for an escort.  She was starting on a three-
+hundred-mile automobile run through a half subdued and dangerous
+country, meaning to visit base hospitals along the German frontier until
+she found a supply of anti-tetanus serum.  Lockjaw, developing from
+seemingly trivial wounds in foot or hand, had already killed six men at
+Chimay within a week.  Four more were dying of the same disease.  So,
+since no able-bodied men could be spared from the overworked staffs of
+the lazarets, she was going for a stock of the serum which might save
+still other victims.  She meant to travel day and night, and if a bullet
+didn't stop her and if the automobile didn't go through a temporary
+bridge she would be back, she thought, within forty-eight hours.  She
+had already made several trips of the sort upon similar missions. Once
+her car had been fired at and once it had been wrecked, but she was
+going again. She was from near Cologne, the wife of a rich manufacturer
+now serving as a captain of reserves.  She hadn't heard from him in four
+weeks.  She didn't know whether he still lived.  She hoped he lived, she
+told us with simple fortitude, but of course these times one never knew.
+
+It was just before sundown.  The nuns had gone upstairs to their little
+chapel for evening services.  Through an open window of the chapel just
+above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the
+sonorous Latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their
+devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of vesper
+sparrows.  Behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty wounded
+men lying on cots.  They had been brought out of the building and put in
+the sunshine. They were on the way to recovery; at least most of them
+were.  I sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was flanked on one
+of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and on another by the
+principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century structure with outdoor
+shrines snuggled up under its eaves.  Except for the chanting of the
+nuns and the braggadocio booming of a big cock-pigeon, which had flown
+down from the church tower to forage for spilt grain almost under my
+feet, the place was quiet.  It was so quiet that when a little column of
+men turned into the head of the street which wound past the front of the
+church and off to the left, I heard the measured tramping of their feet
+upon the stony roadway fully a minute before they came in sight.  I was
+wondering what that rhythmic thumping meant, when one of the nursing
+sisters came and closed the high wooden door at my back, shutting off
+the view of the wounded men.
+
+There appeared a little procession, headed by a priest in his robes and
+two altar-boys.  At the heels of these three were six soldiers bearing
+upon their shoulders a wooden box painted a glaring yellow; and so
+narrow was the box and so shallow-looking, that on the instant the
+thought came to me that the poor clay inclosed therein must feel cramped
+in such scant quarters.  Upon the top of the box, at its widest, highest
+point, rested a wreath of red flowers, a clumsy, spraddly wreath from
+which the red blossoms threatened to shake loose.  Even at a distance of
+some rods I could tell that a man's inexpert fingers must have fashioned
+it.
+
+Upon the shoulders of the bearers the box swayed and jolted.
+
+Following it came, first, three uniformed officers, two German nurses
+and two surgeons from another hospital, as I subsequently learned; and
+following them half a company of soldiers bearing their rifles and
+wearing side arms.  As the small cortege reached a point opposite us an
+officer snapped an order and everybody halted, and the gun-butts of the
+company came down with a smashing abruptness upon the cobbles.  At that
+moment two or three roughly clad civilians issued from a doorway near
+by.  Being Belgians they had small cause to love the Germans, but they
+stopped in their tracks and pulled off their caps.  To pay the tribute
+of a bared head to the dead, even to the unknown dead, is in these
+Catholic countries of Europe as much a part of a man's rule of conduct
+as his religion is.
+
+The priest who led the line turned my way inquiringly.  He did not have
+to wait long for what was to come, nor did I.  Another gate farther
+along in the nunnery wall opened and out came six more soldiers, bearing
+another of these narrow-shouldered coffins, and accompanied by a couple
+of nurses, an officer and an assistant surgeon.  At sight of them the
+soldiers brought their pieces up to a salute, and held the posture
+rigidly until the second dead man in his yellow box had joined the
+company of the first dead man in his.
+
+Just before this happened, though, one of the nurses of the nunnery
+hospital did a thing which I shall never forget.  She must have seen
+that the first coffin had flowers upon it, and in the same instant
+realized that the coffin in whose occupant she had a more direct
+interest was bare.  So she left the straggling line and came running
+back.  The wall streamed with woodbine, very glorious in its autumnal
+flamings.  She snatched a trailer of the red and yellow leaves down from
+where it clung, and as she hurried back her hands worked with magic
+haste, making it into a wreath.  She reached the second squad of bearers
+and put her wreath upon the lid of the box, and then sought her place
+with the other nurses.  The guns went up with a snap upon the shoulders
+of the company.  The soldiers' feet thudded down all together upon the
+stones, and with the priest reciting his office the procession passed
+out of sight, going toward the burial ground at the back of the town.
+Presently, when the shadows were thickening into gloom and the angelus
+bells were ringing in the church, I heard, a long way off, the rattle of
+the rifles as the soldiers fired goodnight volleys over the graves of
+their dead comrades.
+
+On the next day, at Hirson, which was another of our stopping points on
+the journey to the front, we saw the joint funeral of seven men leaving
+the hospital where they had died during the preceding twelve hours, and
+I shan't forget that picture either.  There was a vista bounded by a
+stretch of one of those unutterably bleak backways of a small and shabby
+French town.  The rutted street twisted along between small gray plaster
+houses, with ugly, unnecessary gable-ends, which faced the road at wrong
+angles.  Small groups of towns-people stood against the walls to watch.
+
+
+There was also a handful of idling soldiers who watched from the gateway
+of the house where they were billeted.
+
+Seven times the bearers entered the hospital door, and each time as they
+reappeared, bringing one of the narrow, gaudy, yellow boxes, the
+officers lined up at the door would salute and the soldiers in double
+lines at the opposite side of the road would present arms, and then, as
+the box was lifted upon the wagon waiting to receive it, would smash
+their guns down on the bouldered road with a crash.  When the job of
+bringing forth the dead was done the wagon stood loaded pretty nearly to
+capacity.  Four of the boxes rested crosswise upon the flat wagon-bed
+and the other three were racked lengthwise on top of them.  Here, too,
+was a priest in his robes, and here were two altar boys who straggled,
+so that as the procession started the priest was moved to break off his
+chanting long enough to chide his small attendants and wave them back
+into proper alignment.  With the officers, the nurses and the surgeons
+all marching afoot marched also three bearded civilians in frock coats,
+having the air about them of village dignitaries.  From their presence
+in such company we deduced that one of the seven silent travelers on the
+wagon must be a French soldier, or else that the Germans had seen fit to
+require the attendance of local functionaries at the burial of dead
+Germans.
+
+As the cortege--I suppose you might call it that--went by where I stood
+with my friends, I saw that upon the sides of the coffins names were
+lettered in big, straggly black letters.  I read two of the names--
+Werner was one, Vogel was the other.  Somehow I felt an acuter personal
+interest in Vogel and Werner than in the other five whose names I could
+not read.
+
+Wherever we stopped in Belgium or in France or in Germany these
+soldiers' funerals were things of daily, almost of hourly occurrence.
+And in Maubeuge on this evening, even though dusk had fallen, two of the
+inevitable yellow boxes, mounted upon a two-wheeled cart, were going to
+the burying ground.  We figured the cemetery men would fill the graves
+by lantern light; and knowing something of their hours of employment we
+imagined that with this job disposed of they would probably turn to and
+dig graves by night, making them ready against the needs of the
+following morning.  The new graves always were ready.  They were made in
+advance, and still there were rarely enough of them, no matter how long
+or how hard the diggers kept at their work.  At Aix-la-Chapelle, for
+example, in the principal cemetery the sexton's men dug twenty new
+graves every morning.  By evening there would be twenty shaped mounds of
+clay where the twenty holes had been.  The crop of the dead was the one
+sure crop upon which embattled Europe might count.  That harvest could
+not fail the warring nations, however scanty other yields might be.
+
+In the towns in occupied territory the cemeteries were the only actively
+and constantly busy spots to be found, except the hospitals.  Every
+schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed I think there can be no schoolhouse
+in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such a purpose.
+In their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses mighty well.
+We would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the dead coming out
+in boxes.  We would see how the blackboards, still scrawled over perhaps
+with the chalked sums of lessons which never were finished, now bore
+pasted-on charts dealing in nurses' and surgeons' cipher-manual, with
+the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on the mattresses beneath.
+We would see classrooms where plaster casts and globe maps and dusty
+textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to make room on desktops and
+shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical appliances.  We would see
+the rows of hooks intended originally for the caps and umbrellas of
+little people; but now from each hook dangled the ripped, bloodied
+garments of a soldier--gray for a German, brown-tan for an Englishman,
+blue-and-red for a Frenchman or a Belgian.  By the German rule a wounded
+man's uniform must be brought back with him from the place where he fell
+and kept handily near him, with tags on it, to prove its proper
+identity, and there it must stay until its owner needs it again--if ever
+he needs it again.
+
+We would see these things, and we would wonder if these schoolhouses
+could ever shake off the scents and the stains and the memories of these
+present grim visitations--wonder if children would ever frolic any more
+in the courtyards where the ambulances stood now with red drops
+trickling down from their beds upon the gravel.  But that, on our part,
+was mere morbidness born of the sights we saw.  Children forget even
+more quickly than their elders forget, and we knew, from our own
+experience, how quickly the populace of a French or Flemish community
+could rally back to a colorable counterfeit of their old sprightliness,
+once the immediate burdens of affliction and captivity had been lifted
+from off them.
+
+From a jumbled confusion of recollection of these schoolhouse-hospitals
+sundry incidental pictures stick out in my mind as I write this article.
+I can shut my eyes and visualize the German I saw in the little parish
+school building in the abandoned hamlet of Colligis near by the River
+Aisne.  He was in a room with a dozen others, all suffering from chest
+wounds.  He had been pierced through both lungs with a bullet, and to
+keep him from choking to death the attendants had tied him in a half
+erect posture.  A sort of hammock-like sling passed under his arms, and
+a rope ran from it to a hook in a wall and was knotted fast to the hook.
+He swung there, neither sitting nor lying, fighting for the breath of
+life, with an unspeakable misery looking out from his eyes; and he was
+too far spent to lift a hand to brush away the flies that swarmed upon
+his face and his lips and upon his bare, throbbing throat.  The flies
+dappled the faces of his fellow sufferers with loathsome black dots;
+they literally masked his.  I preserve a memory which is just as vivid
+of certain things I saw in a big institution in Laon.  Although in
+German hands, and nominally under German control, the building was given
+over entirely to crippled and ailing French prisoners.  These patients
+were minded and fed by their own people and attended by captured French
+surgeons.  In our tour of the place I saw only two men wearing the
+German gray.  One was the armed sentry who stood at the gate to see that
+no recovering inmate slipped out, and the other was a German surgeon-
+general who was making his daily round of inspection of the hospitals
+and had brought us along with him. Of the native contingent the person
+who appeared to be in direct charge was a handsome, elderly lady,
+tenderly solicitous of the frowziest Turco in the wards and exquisitely
+polite, with a frozen politeness, to the German officer.  When he
+saluted her she bowed to him deeply and ceremoniously and silently.  I
+never thought until then that a bow could be so profoundly executed and
+yet so icily cold.  It was a lesson in congealed manners.
+
+As we were leaving the room a nun serving as a nurse hailed the German
+and told him one of her charges was threatening to die, not because of
+his wound, but because he had lost heart and believed himself to be
+dying.
+
+"Where is he?" asked the German.
+
+"Yonder," she said, indicating a bundled-up figure on a pallet near the
+door.  A drawn, hopeless face of a half-grown boy showed from the huddle
+of blankets.  The surgeon-general cast a quick look at the swathed form
+and then spoke in an undertone to a French regimental surgeon on duty in
+the room.  Together the two approached the lad.
+
+"My son," said the German to him in French, "I am told you do not feel
+so well to-day."
+
+The boy-soldier whispered an answer and waggled his head despondently.
+The German put his hand on the youth's forehead.
+
+"My son," he said, "listen to me.  You are not going to die--I promise
+you that you shall not die.  My colleague here"--he indicated the French
+doctor--"stands ready to make you the same promise.  If you won't
+believe a German, surely you will take your own countryman's
+professional word for it," and he smiled a little smile under his gray
+mustache.  "Between us we are going to make you well and send you, when
+this war is over, back to your mother.  But you must help us; you must
+help us by being brave and confident.  Is it not so, doctor?" he added,
+again addressing the French physician, and the Frenchman nodded to show
+it was so and sat down alongside the youngster to comfort him further.
+
+As we left the room the German surgeon turned, and looking round I saw
+that once again he saluted the patrician French lady, and this time as
+she bowed the ice was all melted from her bearing.  She must have
+witnessed the little byplay; perhaps she had a son of her own in
+service.  There were mighty few mothers in France last fall who did not
+have sons in service.
+
+Yet one of the few really humorous recollections of this war that I
+preserve had to do with a hospital too; but this hospital was in England
+and we visited it on our way home to America.  We went--two of us--in
+the company of Lord Northcliffe, down into Surrey, to spend a day with
+old Lord Roberts.  Within three weeks thereafter Lord Roberts was dead
+where no doubt he would have willed to die--at the front in France, with
+the sound of the guns in his ears, guarded in his last moments by the
+Ghurkas and the Sikhs of his beloved Indian contingent.  But on this day
+of our visit to him we found him a hale, kindly gentleman of eighty-two
+who showed us his marvelous collection of firearms and Oriental relics
+and the field guns, all historic guns by the way, which he kept upon the
+terraces of his mansion house, and who told us, among other things, that
+in his opinion our own Stonewall Jackson was perhaps the greatest
+natural military genius the world had ever produced.  Leaving his house
+we stopped, on our return to London, at a hospital for soldiers in the
+grounds of Ascot Race Course scarcely two miles from Lord Roberts'
+place.  The refreshment booths and the other rooms at the back and
+underside of the five-shilling stand had been thrown together, except
+the barber's shop, which was being converted into an operating chamber;
+and, what with its tiled walls and high sloped ceiling and glass front,
+the place made a first-rate hospital.
+
+It contained beds for fifty men; but on this day there were less than
+twenty sick and crippled Tommies convalescing here.  They had been
+brought out of France, out of wet and cold and filth, with hurried
+dressings on their hurts; and now they were in this bright, sweet,
+wholesome place, with soft beds under them and clean linen on their
+bodies, and flowers and dainties on the tables that stood alongside
+them, and the gentlefolk of the neighborhood to mind them as volunteer
+nurses.
+
+There were professional nurses, of course; but, under them, the younger
+women of the wealthy families of this corner of Surrey were serving; and
+mighty pretty they all looked, too, in their crisp blue-and-white
+uniforms, with their arm badges and their caps, and their big aprons
+buttoned round their slim, athletic young bodies.  I judge there were
+about three amateur nurses to each patient.  Yet you could not rightly
+call them amateurs either; each of them had taken a short course in
+nursing, it seemed, and was amply competent to perform many of the
+duties a regular nurse must know.  Lady Aileen Roberts was with us
+during our tour of the hospital.  As a daily visitor and patroness she
+spent much of her time here and she knew most of the inmates by name.
+She halted alongside one bed to ask its occupant how he felt.  He had
+been returned from the front suffering from pneumonia.
+
+He was an Irishman.  Before he answered her he cast a quick look about
+the long hall. Afternoon tea was just being served, consisting, besides
+tea, of homemade strawberry jam and lettuce sandwiches made of crisp
+fresh bread, with plenty of butter; and certain elderly ladies had just
+arrived, bringing with them, among other contributions, sheaves of
+flowers and a dogcart loaded with hothouse fruit and a dozen loaves of
+plumcake, which last were still hot from the oven and which radiated a
+mouth-watering aroma as a footman bore them in behind his mistress.  The
+patient looked at all these and he sniffed; and a grin split his face
+and an Irish twinkle came into his eyes.
+
+"Thank you, me lady, for askin'," he said; "but I'm very much afeared
+I'm gettin' better."
+
+We might safely assume that the hospitals and the graveyard of Maubeuge
+would be busy places that evening, thereby offering strong contrasts to
+the rest of the town.  But I should add that we found two other busy
+spots, too: the railroad station--where the trains bringing wounded men
+continually shuttled past--and the house where the commandant of the
+garrison had his headquarters.  In the latter place, as guests of Major
+von Abercron, we met at dinner that night and again after dinner a
+strangely mixed company.  We met many officers and the pretty American
+wife of an officer, Frau Elsie von, Heinrich, late of Jersey City, who
+had made an adventurous trip in a motor ambulance from Germany to see
+her husband before he went to the front, and who sent regards by us to
+scores of people in her old home whose names I have forgotten.  We met
+also a civilian guest of the commandant, who introduced himself as
+August Blankhertz and who turned out to be a distinguished big-game
+hunter and gentleman aeronaut.  With Major von Abercron for a mate he
+sailed from St. Louis in the great balloon race for the James Gordon
+Bennett Cup.  They came down in the Canadian woods and nearly died of
+hunger and exposure before they found a lumber camp.  Their balloon was
+called the Germania.  There was another civilian, a member of the German
+secret-service staff, wearing the Norfolk jacket and the green Alpine
+hat and on a cord about his neck the big gold token of authority which
+invariably mark a representative of this branch of the German espionage
+bureau; and he was wearing likewise that transparent air of mystery
+which seemed always to go with the followers of his ingenious
+profession.
+
+During the evening the mayor of Maubeuge came, a bearded, melancholy
+gentleman, to confer with the commandant regarding a clash between a
+German under-officer and a household of his constituents.  Orderlies and
+attendants bustled in and out, and somebody played Viennese waltz songs
+on a piano, and altogether there was quite a gay little party in the
+parlor of this handsome house which the Germans had commandeered for the
+use of their garrison staff.
+
+At early bedtime, when we stepped out of the door of the lit-up mansion
+into the street, it was as though we had stepped into a far-off country.
+Except for the tramp of a sentry's hobbed boots over the sidewalks and
+the challenging call of another sentry round the corner the town was as
+silent as a town of tombs.  All the people who remained in this place
+had closed their forlorn shops where barren shelves and emptied
+showcases testified to the state of trade; and they had shut themselves
+up in their houses away from sight of the invaders.  We could guess what
+their thoughts must be.  Their industries were paralyzed, and their
+liberties were curtailed, and every other house was a breached and
+worthless shell.  Among ourselves we debated as we walked along to the
+squalid tavern where we had been quartered, which of the spectacles we
+had that day seen most fitly typified the fruitage of war--the
+shattered, haunted forts lying now in the moonlight beyond the town, or
+the brooding conquered, half-destroyed town itself.  I guess, if it
+comes to that, they both typified it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 14
+
+The Red Glutton
+
+
+As we went along next day through the town of Maubeuge we heard singing;
+and singing was a most rare thing to be hearing in this town.  In a
+country where no one smiles any more who belongs in that country,
+singing is not a thing which you would naturally expect to hear.  So we
+turned off of our appointed route.
+
+There was a small wine shop at the prow of a triangle of narrow streets.
+It had been a wine shop.  It was now a beer shop.  There had been a
+French proprietor; he had a German partner now.  It had been only a few
+weeks--you could not as yet measure the interval of time in terms of
+months--since the Germans came and sat themselves down before Maubeuge
+and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter earthquakes and
+marched in and took it.  It had been only these few weeks; but already
+the Germanizing brand of the conqueror was seared deep in the galled
+flanks of this typically French community.  The town-hall clock was made
+to tick German time, which varied by an even hour from French time.
+Tacked upon the door of the little cafe where we ate our meals was a
+card setting forth, with painful German particularity, the tariff which
+might properly be charged for food and for lodging and drink and what
+not; and it was done in German-Gothic script, all very angular and
+precise; and it was signed by His Excellency, the German commandant; and
+its prices were predicated on German logic and the estimated depth of a
+German wallet.  You might read a newspaper printed in German characters,
+if so minded; but none printed in French, whether so minded or not.
+
+So when we entered in at the door of the little French wine shop where
+the three streets met, to find out who within had heart of grace to sing
+'O Strassburg, O Strassburg', so lustily, lo and behold, it had been
+magically transformed into a German beer shop.  It was, as we presently
+learned, the only beer shop in all of Maubeuge, and the reason for that
+was this: No sooner had the Germans cleared and opened the roads back
+across Belgium to their own frontiers than an enterprising tradesman of
+the Rhein country, who somehow had escaped military service, loaded many
+kegs of good German beer upon trucks and brought his precious cargoes
+overland a hundred miles and more southward. Certainly he could not have
+moved the lager caravan without the consent and aid of the Berlin war
+office.  For all I know to the contrary he may have been financed in
+that competent quarter.  That same morning I had seen a field weather
+station, mounted on an automobile, standing in front of our lodging
+place just off the square.  It was going to the front to make and
+compile meteorological reports.  A general staff who provided weather
+offices on wheels and printing offices on wheels--this last for the
+setting up and striking off of small proclamations and orders--might
+very well have bethought themselves that the soldier in the field would
+be all the fitter for the job before him if stayed with the familiar
+malts of the Vaterland.  Believe me, I wouldn't put it past them.
+
+Anyway, having safely reached Maubeuge, the far-seeing Rheinishman
+effected a working understanding with a native publican, which was
+probably a good thing for both, seeing that one had a stock of goods and
+a ready-made trade but no place to set up business, and that the other
+owned a shop, but had lost his trade and his stock-in-trade likewise.
+These two, the little, affable German and the tall, grave Frenchman,
+stood now behind their counter drawing off mugs of Pilsener as fast as
+their four hands could move.  Their patrons, their most vocal and
+boisterous patrons, were a company of musketeers who had marched in from
+the north that afternoon.  As a rule the new levies went down into
+France on troop trains, but this company was part of a draft which for
+some reason came afoot.
+
+Without exception they were young men, husky and hearty and inspired
+with a beefish joviality at having found a place where they could ease
+their feet, and rest their legs, and slake their week-old thirst upon
+their own soothing brews.  Being German they expressed their
+gratefulness in song.  We had difficulty getting into the place, so
+completely was it filled.  Men sat in the window ledges, and in the few
+chairs that were available, and even in the fireplace, and on the ends
+of the bar, clunking their heels against the wooden baseboards.  The
+others stood in such close order they could hardly clear their elbows to
+lift their glasses.  The air was choky with a blended smell derived from
+dust and worn boot leather and spilt essences of hops and healthy,
+unwashed, sweaty bodies.  On a chair in a corner stood a tall, tired and
+happy youth who beat time for the singing with an empty mug and between
+beats nourished himself on drafts from a filled mug which he held in his
+other hand.  With us was a German officer.  He was a captain of reserves
+and a person of considerable wealth.  He shoved his way to the bar and
+laid down upon its sloppy surface two gold coins and said something to a
+petty officer who was directing the distribution of the refreshments.
+
+The noncom.  hammered for silence and, when he got it, announced that
+the Herr Hauptmann had donated twenty marks' worth of beer, all present
+being invited to cooperate in drinking it up, which they did, but first
+gave three cheers for the captain and three more for his American
+friends and afterward, while the replenished mugs radiated in crockery
+waves from the bar to the back walls, sang for us a song which, so far
+as the air was concerned, sounded amazingly like unto Every Little
+Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own.  Their weariness was quite fallen
+away from them; they were like schoolboys on a frolic.  Indeed, I think
+a good many of them were schoolboys.
+
+As we came out a private who stood in the doorway spoke to us in fair
+English.  He had never been in America, but he had a brother living in
+East St. Louis and he wanted to know if any of us knew his brother.
+This was a common experience with us.  Every third German soldier we met
+had a brother or a sister or somebody in America.  This soldier could
+not have been more than eighteen years; the down on his cheeks was like
+corn silk.  He told us he and his comrades were very glad to be going
+forward where there would be fighting.  They had had no luck yet.  There
+had been no fighting where they had been.  I remembered afterward that
+luck was the word he used.
+
+We went back to the main street and for a distance the roar of their
+volleying chorus followed us.  Men and women stood at the doors of the
+houses along the way.  They were silent and idle.  Idleness and silence
+seemed always to have fallen as grim legacies upon the civilian populace
+of these captured towns; but the look upon their faces as they listened
+to the soldiers' voices was not hard to read.  Their town was pierced by
+cannonballs where it was not scarified with fire; there was sorrow and
+the abundant cause for sorrow in every house; commerce was dead and
+credit was killed; and round the next turning their enemy sang his
+drinking song.  I judge that the thrifty Frenchman who went partner with
+the German stranger in the beer traffic lost popularity that day among
+his fellow townsmen.
+
+We were bound for the railway station, which the Germans already had
+rechristened Bahnhof.  Word had been brought to us that trains of
+wounded men and prisoners were due in the course of the afternoon from
+the front, and more especially from the right wing; and in this prospect
+we scented a story to be written.  To reach the station we crossed the
+river Sambre, over a damaged bridge, and passed beneath the arched
+passageway of the citadel which the great Vauban built for the still
+greater Louis XIV, thinking, no doubt, when he built it, that it would
+always be potent to keep out any foe, however strong.  Next to its
+stupid massiveness what most impressed us this day was its utter
+uselessness as a protection.  The station stood just beyond the walls,
+with a park at one side of it, but the park had become a timber
+deadfall.  At the approach of the enemy hundreds of splendid trees had
+been felled to clear the way for gunfire from the inner defenses in the
+event that the Germans got by the outer circle of fortresses.  After the
+Germans took the forts, though, the town surrendered, so all this
+destruction had been futile.  There were acres of ragged stumps and,
+between the stumps, jungles of overlapping trunks and interlacing boughs
+from which the dead and dying leaves shook off in showers.  One of our
+party, who knew something of forestry, estimated that these trees were
+about forty years old.
+
+"I suppose," he added speculatively, "that when this war ends these
+people will replant their trees.  Then in another forty years or so
+another war will come and they will chop them all down again.  On the
+whole I'm rather glad I don't live on this continent."
+
+The trains which were expected had not begun to arrive yet, so with two
+companions I sat on a bench at the back of the station, waiting.  Facing
+us was a line of houses.  One, the corner house, was a big black char.
+It had caught fire during the shelling and burned quite down.  Its
+neighbors were intact, except for shattered chimneys and smashed doors
+and riddled windows.  The concussion of a big gunfire had shivered every
+window in this quarter of town.  There being no sufficient stock of
+glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing in
+fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched the
+holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near by.
+Of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum them up:
+Few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there was any fresh
+glass to buy, and the local glaziers--such of them as survived--would be
+serving the colors.  All France had gone to war and at this time of
+writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams of wounded and
+prisoners.
+
+These ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave
+the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through
+narrow eye slits.  The railroad station was windowless, too, like all
+the buildings round about, but nobody had closed the openings here, and
+it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a North
+European fall searched through it.
+
+In this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen.
+Even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be
+untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them.  A
+hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick
+and crane were hoisting captured French field guns upon flat cars to be
+taken to Berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of
+the stay-at-homes.  A row of these cannons, perhaps fifty in all, were
+ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation.  Except for the
+agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the
+place where we sat was pretty quiet.  There were a million flies, and
+there seemed to be a billion.  You wouldn't have thought, unless you had
+been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the
+world.  By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe
+of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the
+track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin.  Even after a night
+of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday--as thick and as
+clinging and as nasty.  Go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter
+what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.
+
+As I sit and look back on what I myself have seen of it, this war seems
+to me to have been not so much a sight as a stench.  Everything which
+makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed.  What
+it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is a
+vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.
+
+The smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in
+sickening profusion.
+
+I call it a railroad station, although it had lost its functions as such
+weeks before.  The only trains which ran now were run by the Germans for
+strictly German purposes, and so the station had become a victualing
+point for troops going south to the fighting and a way hospital for sick
+and wounded coming back from the fighting.  What, in better days than
+these, had been the lunch room was a place for the redressing of hurts.
+Its high counters, which once held sandwiches and tarts and wine
+bottles, were piled with snowdrifts of medicated cotton and rolls of
+lint and buckets of antiseptic washes and drug vials.  The ticket booth
+was an improvised pharmacy.  Spare medical supplies filled the room
+where formerly fussy customs officers examined the luggage of travelers
+coming out of Belgium into France.  Just beyond the platform a wooden
+booth, with no front to it, had been knocked together out of rough
+planking, and relays of cooks, with greasy aprons over their soiled gray
+uniforms, made vast caldrons of stews--always stews--and brewed
+so-called coffee by the gallon against the coming of those who would need
+it.  The stuff was sure to be needed, all of it and more too.  So they
+cooked and cooked unceasingly and never stopped to wipe a pan or clean a
+spoon.
+
+At our backs was the waiting room for first-class passengers, but no
+passengers of any class came to it any more, and so by common consent it
+was a sort of rest room for the Red Cross men, who mostly were Germans,
+but with a few captured Frenchmen among them, still wearing their French
+uniforms.  There were three or four French military surgeons--prisoners,
+to be sure, but going and coming pretty much as they pleased. The tacit
+arrangement was that the Germans should succor Germans and that the
+Frenchmen should minister to their own disabled countrymen among the
+prisoners going north, but in a time of stress--and that meant every
+time a train came in from the south or west--both nationalities mingled
+together and served, without regard for the color of the coat worn by
+those whom they served.
+
+Probably from the day it was put up this station had never been really
+and entirely clean. Judged by American standards Continental railway
+stations are rarely ever clean, even when conditions are normal.  Now
+that conditions were anything but normal, this Maubeuge station was
+incredibly and incurably filthy.  No doubt the German nursing sisters
+who were brought here tried at first, with their German love for
+orderliness, to keep the interior reasonably tidy; but they had been
+swamped by more important tasks. For two weeks now the wounded had been
+passing through by the thousands and the tens of thousands daily.  So
+between trains the women dropped into chairs or down upon cots and took
+their rest in snatches.  But their fingers didn't reSt. Always their
+hands were busy with the making of bandages and the fluffing of lint.
+
+By bits I learned something about three of the women who served on the
+so-called day shift, which meant that they worked from early morning
+until long after midnight.  One was a titled woman who had volunteered
+for this duty.  She was beyond middle age, plainly in poor health
+herself and everlastingly on the verge of collapse from weakness and
+exhaustion.  Her will kept her on her feet.  The second was a
+professional nurse from one of the university towns--from Bonn, I think.
+She called herself Sister Bartholomew, for the German nurses who go to
+war take other names than their own, just as nuns do. She was a
+beautiful woman, tall and strong and round-faced, with big, fine gray
+eyes. Her energy had no limits.  She ran rather than walked.  She had a
+smile for every maimed man who was brought to her, but when the man had
+been treated, and had limped away or had been carried away, I saw her
+often wringing her hands and sobbing over the utter horror of it all.
+Then another sufferer would appear and she would wipe the tears off her
+cheeks and get to work again.  The third--so an assistant surgeon
+confided to us--was the mistress of an officer at the front, a
+prostitute of the Berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work when
+her lover went to the front.  She Was a tall, dark, handsome girl, who
+looked to be more Spaniard than German, and she was graceful and lithe
+even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that she wore.
+She was less deft than either of her associates but very willing and
+eager.  As between the three--the noblewoman, the working woman and the
+woman of the street--the medical officials in charge made no distinction
+whatsoever.  Why should they? In this sisterhood of mercy they all three
+stood upon the same common ground.  I never knew that slop jars were
+noble things until I saw women in these military lazarets bearing them
+in their arms; then to me they became as altar vessels.
+
+Lacking women to do it, the head surgeon had intrusted the task of
+clearing away the dirt to certain men.  A sorry job they made of it.
+For accumulated nastiness that waiting room was an Augean stable and the
+two soldiers who dawdled about in it with brooms lacked woefully in the
+qualities of Hercules.  Putting a broom in a man's hands is the best
+argument in favor of woman's suffrage that I know of, anyhow.  A third
+man who helped at chores in the transformed lunch room had gathered up
+and piled together in a heap upon the ground near us a bushel or so of
+used bandages--grim reminders left behind after the last train went by--
+and he had touched a match to the heap in an effort to get rid of it by
+fire.  By reason of what was upon them the clothes burned slowly,
+sending up a smudge of acrid smoke to mingle with smells of carbolic
+acid and iodoform, and the scent of boiling food, and of things
+infinitely less pleasant than these.
+
+Presently a train rolled in and we crossed through the building to the
+trackside to watch what would follow.  Already we had seen a sufficiency
+of such trains; we knew before it came what it would be like: In front
+the dumpy locomotive, with a soldier engineer in the cab; then two or
+three box cars of prisoners, with the doors locked and armed guards
+riding upon the roofs; then two or three shabby, misused passenger
+coaches, containing injured officers and sometimes injured common
+soldiers, too; and then, stretching off down the rails, a long string of
+box cars, each of which would be bedded with straw and would contain for
+furniture a few rough wooden benches ranging from side to side.  And
+each car would contain ten or fifteen or twenty, or even a greater
+number, of sick and crippled men.
+
+Those who could sit were upon the hard benches, elbow to elbow, packed
+snugly in. Those who were too weak to sit sprawled upon the straw and
+often had barely room in which to turn over, so closely were they
+bestowed.  It had been days since they had started back from the field
+hospitals where they had had their first-aid treatment.  They had moved
+by sluggish stages with long halts in between.  Always the wounded must
+wait upon the sidings while the troop trains from home sped down the
+cleared main line to the smoking front; that was the merciless but
+necessary rule.  The man who got himself crippled became an obstacle to
+further progress, a drag upon the wheels of the machine; whereas the man
+who was yet whole and fit was the man whom the generals wanted.  So the
+fresh grist for the mill, the raw material, if you will, was expedited
+upon its way to the hoppers; that which already had been ground up was
+relatively of the smallest consequence.
+
+Because of this law, which might not be broken or amended, these wounded
+men would, perforce, spend several days aboard train before they could
+expect to reach the base hospitals upon German soil, Maubeuge being at
+considerably less than midway of the distance between starting point and
+probable destination.  Altogether the trip might last a week or even two
+weeks--a trip that ordinarily would have lasted less than twelve hours.
+Through it these men, who were messed and mangled in every imaginable
+fashion, would wallow in the dirty matted straw, with nothing except
+that thin layer of covering between them and the car floors that jolted
+and jerked beneath them.  We knew it and they knew it, and there was
+nothing to be done.  Their wounds would fester and be hot with fever.
+Their clotted bandages would clot still more and grow stiffer and harder
+with each dragging hour.  Those who lacked overcoats and blankets--and
+some there were who lacked both--would half freeze at night.  For food
+they would have slops dished up for them at such stopping places as this
+present one, and they would slake their thirst on water drawn from
+contaminated wayside wells and be glad of the chance. Gangrene would
+come, and blood poison, and all manner of corruption.  Tetanus would
+assuredly claim its toll.  Indeed, these horrors were already at work
+among them.  I do not tell it to sicken my reader, but because I think I
+should tell it that he may have a fuller conception of what this
+fashionable institution of war means--we could smell this train as we
+could smell all the trains which followed after it, when it was yet
+fifty yards away from us.
+
+Be it remembered, furthermore, that no surgeon accompanied this
+afflicted living freightage, that not even a qualified nurse traveled
+with it.  According to the classifying processes of those in authority
+on the battle lines these men were lightly wounded men, and it was
+presumed that while en route they would be competent to minister to
+themselves and to one another.  Under the grading system employed by the
+chief surgeons a man, who was still all in one piece and who probably
+would not break apart in transit, was designated as being lightly
+wounded.  This statement is no attempt upon my part to indulge in levity
+concerning the most frightful situation I have encountered in nearly
+twenty years of active newspaper work; it is the sober, unexaggerated
+truth.
+
+And so these lightly wounded men--men with their jaws shot away, men
+with holes in their breasts and their abdomens, men with their spine
+tips splintered, men with their arms and legs broken, men with their
+hands and feet shredded by shrapnel, men with their scalps ripped open,
+men with their noses and their ears and their fingers and toes gone, men
+jarred to the very marrow of their bones by explosives--these men, for
+whom ordinarily soft beds would have been provided and expert care and
+special food, came trundling up alongside that noisome station; and,
+through the door openings from where they were housed like dumb beasts,
+they looked out at us with the glazed eyes of dumb suffering beasts.
+
+As the little toy-like European cars halted, bumping together hard,
+orderlies went running down the train bearing buckets of soup, and of
+coffee and of drinking water, and loaves of the heavy, dark German
+bread.  Behind them went other men--bull-necked strong men picked for
+this job because of their strength.  Their task was to bring back in
+their arms or upon their shoulders such men as were past walking.  There
+were no stretchers. There was no time for stretchers.  Behind this train
+would be another one just like it and behind that one, another, and so
+on down an eighty-mile stretch of dolorous way.  And this, mind you, was
+but one of three lines carrying out of France and Belgium into Germany
+victims of the war to be made well again in order that they might return
+and once more be fed as tidbits into the maw of that war; it was but one
+of a dozen or more such streams, threading back from as many battle
+zones to the countries engaged in this wide and ardent scheme of mutual
+extermination.
+
+Half a minute after the train stopped a procession was moving toward us,
+made up of men who had wriggled down or who had been eased down out of
+the cars, and who were coming to the converted buffet room for help.
+Mostly they came afoot, sometimes holding on to one another for mutual
+support.  Perhaps one in five was borne bodily by an orderly.  He might
+be hunched in the orderly's arms like a weary child, or he might be
+traveling upon the orderly's back, pack-fashion, with his arms gripped
+about the bearer's neck; and then, in such a case, the pair of them,
+with the white hollow face of the wounded man nodding above the sweated
+red face of the other, became a monstrosity with two heads and one pair
+of legs.
+
+Here, advancing toward us with the gait of a doddering grandsire, would
+be a boy in his teens, bent double and clutching his middle with both
+hands.  Here would be a man whose hand had been smashed, and from beyond
+the rude swathings of cotton his fingers protruded stiffly and were so
+congested and swollen they looked like fat red plantains.  Here was a
+man whose feet were damaged.  He had a crutch made of a spade handle.
+Next would be a man with a hole in his neck, and the bandages had pulled
+away from about his throat, showing the raw inflamed hole.  In this
+parade I saw a French infantryman aided along by a captured Zouave on
+one side and on the other by a German sentry who swung his loaded
+carbine in his free hand.  Behind them I saw an awful nightmare of a
+man--a man whose face and bare cropped head and hands and shoes were
+all of a livid, poisonous, green cast. A shell of some new and
+particularly devilish variety had burst near him and the fumes which it
+generated in bursting had dyed him green.  Every man would have, tied
+about his neck or to one of his buttonholes, the German field-doctor's
+card telling of the nature of his hurt and the place where he had
+sustained it; and the uniform of nearly every one would be discolored
+with dried blood, and where the coat gaped open you marked that the
+harsh, white cambric lining was made harsher still by stiff, brownish-
+red streakings.
+
+In at the door of the improvised hospital filed the parade, and the
+wounded men dropped on the floor or else were lowered upon chairs and
+tables and cots--anywhere that there was space for them to huddle up or
+stretch out.  And then the overworked surgeons, French and German, and
+the German nursing sisters and certain of the orderlies would fall to.
+There was no time for the finer, daintier proceedings that might have
+spared the sufferers some measure of their agony.  It was cut away the
+old bandage, pull off the filthy cotton, dab with antiseptics what was
+beneath, pour iodine or diluted acid upon the bare and shrinking
+tissues, perhaps do that with the knife or probe which must be done
+where incipient mortification had set in, clap on fresh cotton, wind a
+strip of cloth over it, pin it in place and send this man away to be
+fed--providing he could eat; then turn to the next poor wretch.  The
+first man was out of that place almost before the last man was in; that
+was how fast the work went forward.
+
+One special horror was spared: The patients made no outcry.  They
+gritted their teeth and writhed where they lay, but none shrieked out.
+Indeed, neither here nor at any of the other places where I saw wounded
+men did we hear that chorus of moans and shrieks with which fiction
+always has invested such scenes.  Those newly struck seemed stunned into
+silence; those who had had time to recover from the first shock of being
+struck appeared buoyed and sustained by a stoic quality which lifted
+them, mute and calm, above the call of tortured nerves and torn flesh.
+Those who were delirious might call out; those who were conscious locked
+their lips and were steadfast.  In all our experience I came upon just
+two men in their senses who gave way at all.  One was a boy of nineteen
+or twenty, in a field hospital near Rheims, whose kneecap had been
+smashed.  He sat up on his bed, rocking his body and whimpering
+fretfully like an infant.  He had been doing that for days, a nurse told
+us, but whether he whimpered because of his suffering or at the thought
+of going through life with a stiffened leg she did not know. The other
+was here at Maubeuge.  I helped hold his right arm steady while a
+surgeon took the bandages off his hand.  When the wrapping came away a
+shattered finger came with it--it had rotted off, if you care to know
+that detail--and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping,
+animal-like sounds.  Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than
+the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne.  He had
+been bearing it for days.
+
+I particularly remember one other man who was brought in off this first
+train.  He was a young giant.  For certain the old father of Frederick
+the Great would have had him in his regiment of Grenadier Guards.  Well,
+for that matter, he was a grenadier in the employ of the same family
+now.  He hobbled in under his own motive power and leaned against the
+wall until the first flurry was over.  Then, at a nod from one of the
+shirt-sleeved surgeons, he stretched himself upon a bare wooden table
+which had just been vacated and indicated that he wanted relief for his
+leg--which leg, I recall, was incased in a rude, splintlike arrangement
+of plaited straw.  The surgeon took off the straw and the packing
+beneath it.  The giant had a hole right through his knee, from side to
+side, and the flesh all about it was horribly swollen and purplish-
+black.  So the surgeon soused the joint, wound and all, with iodine; the
+youth meanwhile staring blandly up at the ceiling with his arms crossed
+on his wide breast. I stood right by him, looking into his face, and he
+didn't so much as bat an eyelid.  But he didn't offer to get up when the
+surgeon was done with treating him.  He turned laboriously over on his
+face, pulling his shirt free from his body as he did so, and then we saw
+that he had a long, infected gash from a glancing bullet across the
+small of his back.  He had been lying on one angry wound while the other
+was redressed.  You marveled, not that he had endured it without
+blenching, but that he had endured it at all.
+
+The train stayed with us perhaps half an hour, and in that half hour at
+least a hundred men must have had treatment of sorts.  A signal sounded
+and the orderlies lifted up the few wasted specters who still remained
+and toted them out.  Almost the last man to be borne away was injured in
+both legs; an orderly carried him in his arms.  Seeing the need of haste
+the orderly sought to heave his burden aboard the nearest car.  The men
+in that car protested; already their space was overcrowded.  So the
+patient orderly staggered down the train until he found the crippled
+soldier's rightful place and thrust him into the straw just as the
+wheels began to turn.  As the cars, gathering speed, rolled by us we
+could see that nearly all the travelers were feeding themselves from
+pannikins of the bull-meat stew.  Wrappings on their hands and sometimes
+about their faces made them doubly awkward, and the hot tallowy mess
+spilt in spattering streams upon them and upon the straw under them.
+
+They were on their way.  At the end of another twenty-four hour stretch
+they might have traveled fifty or sixty or even seventy miles.  The
+place they left behind them was in worse case than before.  Grease
+spattered the earth; the floor of the buffet room was ankle deep,
+literally, in discarded bandages and blood-stiffened cotton; and the
+nurses and the doctors and the helpers dropped down in the midst of it
+all to snatch a few precious minutes of rest before the next creaking
+caravan of misery arrived.  There was no need to tell them of its
+coming; they knew.  All through that afternoon and night, and through
+the next day and night, and through the half of the third day that we
+stayed on in Maubeuge, the trains came back.  They came ten minutes
+apart, twenty minutes apart, an hour apart, but rarely more than an hour
+would elapse between trains.  And this traffic in marred and mutilated
+humanity had been going on for four weeks and would go on for nobody
+knew how many weeks more.
+
+When the train had gone out of sight beyond the first turn to the
+eastward I spoke to the head surgeon of the German contingent--a broad,
+bearded, middle-aged man who sat on a baggage truck while an orderly
+poured a mixture of water and antiseptics over his soiled hands.
+
+"A lot of those poor devils will die?" I suggested.
+
+"Less than three per cent of those who get back to the base hospitals
+will die," he said with a snap of his jaw, as though challenging me to
+doubt the statement.  "That is the wonder of this war--that so many are
+killed in the fighting and that so few die who get back out of it alive.
+These modern scientific bullets, these civilized bullets"--he laughed in
+self-derision at the use of the word--"they are cruel and yet they are
+merciful too.  If they do not kill you outright they have a little way,
+somehow, of not killing you at all."
+
+"But the bayonet wounds and the saber wounds?" I said.  "How about
+them?"
+
+"I have been here since the very first," he said; "since the day after
+our troops took this town, and God knows how many thousands of wounded
+men--Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turcos, some Belgians--have passed
+through my hands; but as yet I have to see a man who has been wounded by
+a saber or a lance.  I saw one bayonet wound yesterday or the day
+before.  The man had fallen on his own bayonet and driven it into his
+side.  Shrapnel wounds? Yes.  Wounds from fragments of bombs? Again,
+yes. Bullet wounds? I can't tell you how many of those I have seen, but
+surely many thousands.  But no bayonet wounds.  This is a war of hot
+lead, not of cold steel.  I read of these bayonet charges, but I do not
+believe that many such stories are true."
+
+I didn't believe it either.
+
+The train which followed after the first, coming up out of France,
+furnished for us much the same sights the first one had furnished, and
+so, with some slight variations, did the third train and the fourth and
+all the rest of them.  The station became a sty where before it had been
+a kennel; the flies multiplied; the stenches increased in volume and
+strength, if such were possible; the windows of the littered waiting
+room, with their cracked half panes, were like ribald eyes winking at
+the living afflictions which continually trailed past them; the floors
+looked as though there had been a snowstorm.
+
+A train came, whose occupants were nearly all wounded by shrapnel.
+Wounds of the head, the face and the neck abounded among these men--for
+the shells, exploding in the air above where they crouched in their
+trenches, had bespattered them with iron pebbles.  Each individual
+picture of! suffering recurred with such monotonous and regular
+frequency that after an hour or so it took something out of the common
+run--an especially vivid splash of daubed and crimson horror--to quicken
+our imaginations and make us fetch out our note books.  I recall a young
+lieutenant of Uhlans who had been wounded in the breast by fragments of
+a grenade, which likewise had smashed in several of his ribs.  He
+proudly fingered his newly acquired Iron Cross while the surgeon relaced
+his battered torso with strips of gauze.  Afterward he asked me for a
+cigar, providing I had one to spare, saying he had not tasted tobacco
+for a week and was perishing for a smoke.  We began to take note then
+how the wounded men watched us as we puffed at our cigars, and we
+realized they were dumbly envying us each mouthful of smoke.  So we sent
+our chauffeur to the public market with orders to buy all the cigars he
+could find on sale there.  He presently returned with the front and rear
+seats of the automobile piled high with bundled sheaves of the brown
+weed--you can get an astonishingly vast number of those domestic French
+cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in American money--and we
+turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse on condition that, until
+the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to every hurt soldier who
+might crave one, regardless of his nationality.  She cried as she
+thanked us for the small charity.
+
+"We can feed them--yes," she said, "but we have nothing to give them to
+smoke, and it is very hard on them."
+
+A little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of French
+prisoners and one carload of English.  Among the Frenchmen were many
+Alpine Rangers, so called--the first men we had seen of this wing of the
+service--and by reason of their dark blue uniforms and their flat blue
+caps they looked more like sailors than soldiers.  At first we took them
+for sailors.  There were thirty-four of the Englishmen, being all that
+were left of a company of the West Yorkshire Regiment of infantry.
+Confinement for days in a bare box car, with not even water to wash
+their faces and hands in, had not altogether robbed them of a certain
+trim alertness which seems to belong to the British fighting man.  Their
+puttees were snugly reefed about their shanks and their khaki tunics
+buttoned up to their throats.
+
+We talked with them.  They wanted to know if they had reached Germany
+yet, and when we told them that they were not out of France and had all
+of Belgium still to traverse, they groaned their dismay in chorus.
+
+"We've 'ad a very 'ard time of it, sir," said a spokesman, who wore
+sergeant's stripes on his sleeves and who told us he came from
+Sheffield.  "Seventeen 'ours we were in the trench, under fire all the
+time, with water up to our middles and nothing to eat.  We were 'olding
+the center and when the Frenchies fell back they didn't give our chaps
+no warning, and pretty soon the Dutchmen they 'ad us flanked both sides
+and we 'ad to quit.  But we didn't quit until we'd lost all but one of
+our officers and a good 'alf of our men."
+
+"Where was this?" one of us asked.
+
+"Don't know, sir," he said.  "It's a blooming funny war.  You never
+knows the name of the place where you're fighting at, unless you 'ears
+it by chance."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"Could you tell us, sir, 'ow's the war going? Are we giving the Germans
+a proper 'iding all along the line?"
+
+We inquired regarding their treatment.  They didn't particularly fancy
+the food--narsty slop, the sergeant called it--although it was
+reasonably plentiful; and, being true Englishmen, they sorely missed
+their tea.  Then, too, on the night before their overcoats had been
+taken from them and no explanations vouchsafed.
+
+"We could 'ave done with them," said the speaker bitterly; "pretty cold
+it was in this 'ere car.  And what with winter coming on and everything
+I call it a bit thick to be taking our overcoats off of us."
+
+We went and asked a German officer who had the convoy in charge the
+reason for this, and he said the overcoats of all the uninjured men,
+soldiers as well as prisoners, had been confiscated to furnish coverings
+for such of the wounded as lacked blankets.  Still, I observed that the
+guards for the train had their overcoats.  So I do not vouch for the
+accuracy of his explanation.
+
+It was getting late in the afternoon and the fifth train to pull in from
+the south since our advent on the spot--or possibly it was the sixth--
+had just halted when, from the opposite direction, a troop-train, long
+and heavy, panted into sight and stopped on the far track while the men
+aboard it got an early supper of hot victuals.  We crossed over to have
+a look at the new arrivals.
+
+It was a long train, drawn by one locomotive and shoved by another, and
+it included in its length a string of flat cars upon which were lashed
+many field pieces, and commandeered automobiles, and even some family
+carriages, not to mention baggage wagons and cook wagons and supply
+wagons.  For a wonder, the coaches in which the troops rode were new,
+smart coaches, seemingly just out of the builders' hands.  They were
+mainly first and second class coaches, varnished outside and equipped
+with upholstered compartments where the troopers took their luxurious
+ease.  Following the German fashion, the soldiers had decorated each car
+with field flowers and sheaves of wheat and boughs of trees, and even
+with long paper streamers of red and white and black.  Also, the artists
+and wags of the detachment had been busy with colored chalks. There was
+displayed on one car a lively crayon picture of a very fierce,
+two-tailed Bavarian lion eating up his enemies--a nation at a bite.
+Another car bore a menu:
+
+Russian caviar
+
+Servian rice meat English roast beef
+
+Belgian ragout French pastry
+
+Upon this same car was lettered a bit of crude verse, which, as we had
+come to know, was a favorite with the German private.  By my poor
+translation it ran somewhat as follows:
+
+For the Slav, a kick we have,
+And for the Jap a slap;
+The Briton too--we'll beat him blue,
+And knock the Frenchman flat.
+
+
+Altogether the train had quite the holidaying air about it and the men
+who traveled on it had the same spirit too.  They were Bavarians--all
+new troops, and nearly all young fellows.  Their accouterments were
+bright and their uniforms almost unsoiled, and I saw that each man
+carried in his right boot top the long, ugly-looking dirk-knife that the
+Bavarian foot-soldier fancies.  The Germans always showed heat when they
+found a big service clasp-knife hung about a captured Englishman's neck
+on a lanyard, calling it a barbarous weapon because of the length of the
+blade and long sharp brad-awl which folded into a slot at the back of the
+handle; but an equally grim bit of cutlery in a Bavarian's bootleg
+seemed to them an entirely proper tool for a soldier to be carrying.
+
+The troops--there must have been a full battalion of them--piled off the
+coaches to exercise their legs.  They skylarked about on the earth, and
+sang and danced, and were too full of coltish spirits to eat the rations
+that had been brought from the kitchen for their consumption.  Seeing
+our cameras, a lieutenant who spoke English came up to invite us to make
+a photograph of him and his men, with their bedecked car for a
+background.  He had been ill, he said, since the outbreak of
+hostilities, which explained why he was just now getting his first taste
+of active campaigning service.
+
+"Wait," he said vaingloriously, "just wait until we get at the damned
+British.  Some one else may have the Frenchmen--we want to get our hands
+on the Englishmen.  Do you know what my men say? They say they are glad
+for once in their lives to enjoy a fight where the policemen won't
+interfere and spoil the sport.  That's the Bavarian for you--the
+Prussian is best at drill, but the Bavarian is the best fighter in the
+whole world.  Only let us see the enemy--that is all we ask!
+
+"I say, what news have you from the front? All goes well, eh? As for me
+I only hope there will be some of the enemy left for us to kill.  It is
+a glorious thing--this going to war! I think we shall get there very
+soon, where the fighting is.  I can hardly wait for it." And with that
+he hopped up on the steps of the nearest car and posed for his picture.
+
+Having just come from the place whither he was so eagerly repairing I
+might have told him a few things.  I might for example have told him
+what the captain of a German battery in front of La Fere had said, and
+that was this:
+
+"I have been on this one spot for nearly three weeks now, serving my
+guns by day and by night.  I have lost nearly half of my original force
+of men and two of my lieutenants.  We shoot over those tree tops yonder
+in accordance with directions for range and distance which come from
+somewhere else over field telephone, but we never see the men at whom we
+are firing.  They fire back without seeing us, and sometimes their
+shells fall short or go beyond us, and sometimes they fall among us and
+kill and wound a few of us.  Thus it goes on day after day.  I have not
+with my own eyes seen a Frenchman or an Englishman unless he was a
+prisoner.  It is not so much pleasure--fighting like this."
+
+I might have told the young Bavarian lieutenant of other places where I
+had been--places where the dead lay for days unburied.  I might have
+told him there was nothing particularly pretty or particularly edifying
+about the process of being killed.  Death, I take it, is never a very
+tidy proceeding; but in battle it acquires an added unkemptness.  Men
+suddenly and sorely stricken have a way of shrinking up inside their
+clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a way of tearing their
+coats open and gripping with their hands at their vitals, as though to
+hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling their legs in grotesque
+postures; they have a way of putting their arms up before their faces as
+though at the very last they would shut out a dreadful vision.  Those
+contorted, twisted arms with the elbows up, those spraddled stark legs,
+and, most of all, those white dots of shirts--those I had learned to
+associate in my own mind with the accomplished fact of mortality upon
+the field.
+
+I might have told him of sundry field hospitals which I had lately
+visited.  I could recreate in my memory, as I shall be able to recreate
+it as long as I live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain
+schoolhouse in a French town where seven men wriggled and fought in the
+unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity
+with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to
+be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces
+laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up
+at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps
+of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both
+legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men--and boys
+too--all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black
+night which would be their portion through all their days.  Indeed for
+an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which
+he was hastening I might have taken him by the arm and led him across
+two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were
+hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves,
+and macerated out of the living image of their Maker.
+
+But I did none of these things.  He had a picture of something uplifting
+and splendid before his eyes.  He wanted to fight, or he thought he did,
+which came to the same thing.
+
+So what I did was to take down his name and promise to send him a
+completed copy of his picture in the care of his regiment and brigade;
+and the last I saw of him he was half out of a car window waving good-by
+to us and wishing us auf wiedersehen as he was borne away to his
+ordained place.
+
+As we rode back through the town of Maubeuge in the dusk, the company
+which had sung O Strassburg in the Franco-German beer shop at the prow
+of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away.  I
+thought I caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like
+quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about
+to have some luck.
+
+In two days fourteen thousand wounded men came back through Maubeuge,
+and possibly ten times that many new troops, belonging to the first
+October draft of a million, passed down the line.  In that week fifty
+thousand wounded men returned from the German right wing alone.
+
+He's a busy Red Glutton.  There seems to be no satisfying his greed..
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 15
+
+Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe
+
+
+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.
+
+They have called her the cockpit of Europe.  She is too.  In wars that
+were neither of her making nor her choosing she has borne the hardest
+blows--a poor little buffer state thrust in between great and truculent
+neighbors.  To strike at one another they must strike Belgium.  By the
+accident of geography and the caprice of boundary lines she has always
+been the anvil for their hammers.  Jemmapes and Waterloo, to cite two
+especially conspicuous examples among great Continental battles, were
+fought on her soil.  Indeed, there is scarcely an inch of her for the
+possession of which men of breeds not her own--Austrians and Spaniards,
+Hanoverians and Hollanders, Englishmen and Prussians, Saxons and
+Frenchmen--have not contended.  These others won the victories or lost
+them, kept the spoils or gave them up; she wore the scars of the grudges
+when the grudges were settled.  So there is a reason for calling her the
+cockpit of the nations; but, as I said just now, I shall think of her as
+Europe's rag doll--a thing to be clouted and kicked about; to be crushed
+under the hoofs and the heels; to be bled and despoiled and ravished.
+
+Thinking of her so, I do not mean by this comparison to reflect in any
+wise on the courage of her people.  It will be a long time before the
+rest of the world forgets the resistance her soldiers made against
+overbrimming odds, or the fortitude with which the families of those
+soldiers faced a condition too lamentable for description.
+
+Unsolicited, so competent an authority as Julius Caesar once gave the
+Belgians a testimonial for their courage.  If I recall the commentaries
+aright, he said they were the most valorous of all the tribes of Gaul.
+Those who come afterward to set down the tale and tally of the Great War
+will record that through the centuries the Belgians retained their
+ancient valor.
+
+First and last, I had rather exceptional opportunities for viewing the
+travail of Belgium.  I was in Brussels before it surrendered and after
+it surrendered.  I was in Louvain when the Germans entered it and I was
+there again after the Germans had wrecked it.  I trailed the original
+army of invasion from Brussels southward to the French border, starting
+at the tail of the column and reaching the head of it before, with my
+companions, I was arrested and returned by another route across Belgium
+to German soil.
+
+Within three weeks thereafter I started on a ten-day tour which carried
+me through Liege, Namur, Huy, Dinant and Chimay, and brought me back by
+Mons, Brussels, Louvain and Tirlemont, with a side trip to the trenches
+before Antwerp--roughly, a kite-shaped journey which comprehended
+practically all the scope of active operations among the contending
+armies prior to the time when the struggle for western Flanders began.
+Finally, just after Antwerp fell, I skirted the northern frontiers of
+Belgium and watched the refugees pouring across the borders into
+Holland.  I was four times in Liege and three times in Brussels, and any
+number of times I crossed and recrossed my own earlier trails.  I
+traveled afoot; in a railroad train, with other prisoners; in a taxi-
+cab, which we lost; in a butcher's cart, which we gave away; in an open
+carriage, which deserted us; and in an automobile, which vanished.
+
+I saw how the populace behaved while their little army was yet intact,
+offering gallant resistance to the Germans; I saw how they behaved when
+the German wedge split that army into broken fragments and the Germans
+were among them, holding dominion with the bayonet and the bullet; and
+finally, six weeks later, I saw how they behaved when substantially all
+their country, excluding a strip of seaboard, had been reduced to the
+state of a conquered fief held and ruled by force of arms.
+
+By turns I saw them determined, desperate, despairing, half rebellious,
+half subdued; resigned with the resignation of sheer helplessness, which
+I take it is a different thing from the resignation of sheer
+hopelessness.  It is no very pleasant sight to see a country flayed and
+quartered like a bloody carcass in a meat shop; but an even less
+pleasant thing than that is to see a country's heart broken.  And
+Belgium to-day is a country with a broken heart.
+
+These lines were written with intent to be printed early in January.  By
+that time Christmas was over and done with.  On the other side of the
+Atlantic Ocean, in lieu of the Christmas carols, the cannon had rung its
+brazen Christmas message across the trenches, making mockery of the
+words: "On earth peace, good will toward men." On our side of the ocean
+the fine spirit of charity and graciousness which comes to most of us at
+Christmastime and keeps Christmas from becoming a thoroughly
+commercialized institution had begun to abate somewhat of its fervor.
+
+To ourselves we were saying, many of us: "We have done enough for the
+poor, whom we have with us always." But not always do we have with us a
+land famous for its fecundity that is now at grips with famine; a land
+that once was light-hearted, but where now you never hear anyone laugh
+aloud; a land that is half a waste and half a captive province; a land
+that cannot find bread to feed its hungry mouths, yet is called on to
+pay a tribute heavy enough to bankrupt it even in normal times; a land
+whose best manhood is dead on the battleground or rusting in military
+prisons; whose women and children by the countless thousands are either
+homeless wanderers thrust forth on the bounty of strangers in strange
+places, or else are helpless, hungry paupers sitting with idle hands in
+their desolated homes--and that land is Belgium.
+
+Having been an eyewitness to the causes that begot this condition and to
+the condition itself, I feel it my duty to tell the story as I know it.
+I am trying to tell it dispassionately, without prejudice for any side
+and without hysteria.  I concede the same to be a difficult undertaking.
+
+Some space back I wrote that I had been able to find in Belgium no
+direct proof of the mutilations, the torturings and other barbarities
+which were charged against the Germans by the Belgians.  Though fully a
+dozen seasoned journalists, both English and American, have agreed with
+me, saying that their experiences in this regard had been the same as
+mine; and though I said in the same breath that I could not find in
+Germany any direct evidence of the brutalities charged against the
+Belgians by the Germans, the prior statement was accepted by some
+persons as proof that my sympathy for the Belgians had been chilled
+through association with the Germans.  No such thing.  But what I desire
+now is the opportunity to say this: In the face of the present plight of
+this little country we need not look for individual atrocities.  Belgium
+herself is the capsheaf atrocity of the war.  No matter what our
+nationality, our race or our sentiments may be, none of us can get away
+from that.
+
+Going south into France from the German border city of Aix-la-Chapelle,
+our automobile carried us down the Meuse.  On the eastern bank, which
+mainly we followed during the first six hours of riding, there were
+craggy cliffs, covered with forests, which at intervals were cleft by
+deep ravines, where small farms clung to the sides of the steep hills.
+On the opposite shore cultivated lands extended from the limit of one's
+vision down almost to the water.  There they met a continuous chain of
+manufacturing plants, now all idle, which stretched along the river
+shore from end to end of the valley.  Culm and flume and stack and kiln
+succeeded one another unendingly, but no smoke issued from any chimney;
+and we noted that already weeds were springing up in the quarry yards
+and about the mouths of the coal pits and the doorways of the empty
+factories.
+
+Considering that the Germans had to fight their way along the Meuse,
+driving back the French and Belgians before they trusted their columns
+to enter the narrow defiles, there was in the physical aspect of things
+no great amount of damage visible.  Stagnation, though, lay like a
+blight on what had been one of the busiest and most productive
+industrial districts in all of Europe.  Except that trains ran by
+endlessly, bearing wounded men north, and fresh troops and fresh
+supplies south, the river shore was empty and silent.
+
+In twenty miles of running we passed just two groups of busy men.  At
+one place a gang of German soldiers were strengthening the temporary
+supports of a railroad bridge which had been blown up by the retiring
+forces and immediately repaired by the invaders.  In another place a
+company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had
+been sent back from the front in carload lots.  There were horses here
+--a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that
+relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves
+itself.  The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured
+up, or to be shot in the event that they were past mending.
+
+I had seen perhaps a hundred thousand head of horses, drawing cannon and
+wagons, and serving as mounts for officers in the first drive of the
+Germans toward Paris, and had marveled at the uniformly prime condition
+of the teams.  Presumably these sorry crow-baits, which drooped and
+limped about the barren railroad yards at the back of the siding where
+the shell loaders squatted, had been whole-skinned and sound of wind and
+joint in early August.
+
+Two months of service had turned them into gaunt wrecks.  Their ribs
+stuck through their hollow sides.  Their hoofs were broken; their hocks
+were swelled enormously; and, worst of all, there were great raw wounds
+on their shoulders and backs, where the collars and saddles had worn
+through hide and flesh to the bones.  From that time on, the numbers of
+mistreated, worn-out horses we encountered in transit back from the
+front increased steadily.  Finally we ceased to notice them at all.
+
+I should explain that the description I have given of the prevalent
+idleness along the Meuse applied to the towns and to the scattered
+workingmen's villages that flanked all or nearly all the outlying and
+comparatively isolated factories.  In the fields and the truck patches
+the farming folks--women and old men usually, with here and there
+children--bestirred themselves to get the moldered and mildewed
+remnants of their summer-ripened crops under cover before the hard frost
+came.
+
+Invariably we found this state of affairs to exist wherever we went in
+the districts of France and of Belgium that had been fought over and
+which were now occupied by the Germans.  Woodlands and cleared places,
+where engagements had taken place, would, within a month or six weeks
+thereafter, show astonishingly few traces of the violence and death that
+had violated the peace of the countryside.  New grass would be growing
+in the wheel ruts of the guns and on the sides of the trenches in which
+infantry had screened itself.  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.  The civic populace get it, and, as soon
+as they have been readjusted to the altered conditions forced on them by
+the presence of war, they become merely sluggish, dulled spectators of
+the great and moving events going on about them.  The nurses and the
+surgeons get it, or else they would go mad from the horrors that
+surround them.  The wounded get it, and cease from complaint and
+lamenting.
+
+It is as though all the nerve ends in every human body were burnt blunt
+in the first hot gush of war.  Even the casual eyewitness gets it.  We
+got it ourselves; and not until we had quit the zone of hostilities did
+we shake it off.  Indeed, we did not try.  It made for subsequent sanity
+to carry for the time a drugged and stupefied imagination.
+
+Barring only Huy, where there had been some sharp street fighting, as
+attested by shelled buildings and sandbag barricades yet resting on
+housetops and in window sills, we encountered in the first stage of our
+journey no considerable evidences of havoc until late in the afternoon,
+when we reached Dinant.  I do not understand why the contemporary
+chronicles of events did not give more space to Dinant at the time of
+its destruction, and why they have not given it more space subsequently.
+
+I presume the reason lies in the fact that the same terrible week which
+included the burning of Louvain included also the burning of Dinant; and
+in the world-wide cry of protestation and distress which arose with the
+smoke of the greater calamity the smaller voice of grief for little
+ruined Dinant was almost lost. Yet, area considered, no place in Belgium
+that I have visited--and this does not exclude Louvain--suffered such
+wholesale demolition as Dinant.
+
+Before war began, the town had something less than eight thousand
+inhabitants.  When I got there it had less than four thousand, by the
+best available estimates.  Of those four thousand more than twelve
+hundred were then without food from day to day except such as the
+Germans gave them.  There were almost no able-bodied male adults left.
+Some had fled, some were behind bars as prisoners of the Germans, and a
+great many were dead.  Estimates of the number of male inhabitants who
+had been killed by the graycoats for offenses against the inflexible
+code set up by the Germans in eastern Belgium varied.  A cautious native
+whispered that nine hundred of his fellow townsmen were "up there"--by
+that meaning the trenches on the hills back of the town.  A German
+officer, newly arrived on the spot and apparently sincere in his efforts
+to alleviate the misery of the survivors, told us that, judging by what
+data he had been able to gather, between four and six hundred men and
+youths of Dinant had fallen in the house-to-house conflicts between
+Germans and civilians, or in the wholesale executions which followed the
+subjugation of the place and the capture of such ununiformed
+belligerents as were left.
+
+In this instance subjugation meant annihilation.  The lower part of the
+town, where the well-to-do classes lived, was almost unscathed.  Casual
+shell-fire in the two engagements with the French that preceded the
+taking of Dinant had smashed some cornices and shattered some windows,
+but nothing worse befell.  The lower half, made up mainly of the little
+plaster-and-stone houses of working people, was gone, extinguished,
+obliterated.  It lay in scorched and crumbled waste; and in it, as we
+rode through, I saw, excluding soldiers, just two living creatures.  Two
+children, both little girls, were playing at housekeeping on some stone
+steps under a doorway where there was no door, using bits of wreckage
+for furniture.  We stopped a moment to watch them.  They had small china
+dolls.
+
+The river, flowing placidly along between the artificial boundaries of
+its stone quays, and the strange formation of cliffs, rising at the back
+to the height of hundreds of feet, were as they had been.  Soldiers
+paddled on the water in skiffs and thousands of ravens flickered about
+the pinnacles of the rocks, but between river and cliff there was
+nothing but ruination--the graveyard of the homes of three thousand
+people.
+
+Yes, it was the graveyard not alone of their homes but of their
+prosperity and their hopes and their ambitions and their aspirations--
+the graveyard of everything human beings count worth having.  This was
+worse than Herve or Battice or Vise, or any of the leveled towns we had
+seen.  Taken on the basis of comparative size, it was worse even than
+Louvain, as we discovered later.  It was worse than anything I ever saw
+--worse than anything I ever shall see, I think.
+
+These hollow shells about us were like the picked cadavers of houses.
+Ends of burnt and broken rafters stood up like ribs.  Empty window
+openings stared at us like the eye sockets in skulls.  It was not a town
+upon which we looked, but the dead and rotting bones of a town.
+
+Just over the ragged line that marked the lowermost limits of the
+destructive fury of the conquerors, and inside the section which
+remained intact, we traversed a narrow street called--most
+appropriately, I thought--the Street of Paul the Penitent, and passed a
+little house on the shutters of which was written, in chalked German
+script, these words: "A Grossmutter"--grandmother--"ninety-six years old
+lives here.  Don't disturb her." Other houses along here bore the
+familiar line, written by German soldiers who had been billeted in them:
+"Good people.  Leave them alone!"
+
+The people who enjoyed the protection of these public testimonials were
+visible, a few of them.  They were nearly all women and children.  They
+stood in their shallow doorways as our automobile went by bearing four
+Americans, two German officers and the orderly of one of the officers--
+for we had picked up a couple of chance passengers in Huy--and a German
+chauffeur.  As we interpreted their looks, they had no hate for the
+Germans.  I take it the weight of their woe was so heavy on them that
+they had no room in their souls for anything else.
+
+Just beyond Dinant, at Anseremme, a beautiful little village at the
+mouth of a tiny river, where artists used to come to paint pictures and
+sick folks to breathe the tonic balsam of the hills, we got rooms for
+the night in a smart, clean tavern.  Here was quartered a captain of
+cavalry, who found time--so brisk was he and so high-spirited--to
+welcome us to the best the place afforded, to help set the table for our
+belated supper, and to keep on terms of jovial yet punctilious
+amiability with the woman proprietor and her good-looking daughters;
+also, to require his troopers to pay the women, in salutes and spoken
+thanks, for every small office performed.
+
+The husband of the older woman and the husband of one of the daughters
+were then serving the Belgian colors, assuming that they had not been
+killed or caught; but between them and this German captain a perfect
+understanding had been arrived at. When the head of the house fixed the
+prices she meant to charge us for our accommodations, he spoke up and
+suggested that the rate was scarcely high enough; and also, since her
+regular patrons had been driven away at the beginning of the war, he
+advised us that sizable tips on our leaving would probably be
+appreciated.
+
+Next morning we rose from a breakfast--the meat part of it having been
+furnished from the German commissary--to find twenty lancers exercising
+their horses in a lovely little natural arena, walled by hills, just
+below the small eminence whereon the house stood.  It was like a scene
+from a Wild West exhibition at home, except that these German horsemen
+lacked the dash of our cowpunchers.  Watching the show from a back
+garden, we stood waist deep in flowers, and the captain's orderly, when
+he came to tell us our automobile was ready, had a huge peony stuck in a
+buttonhole of his blouse.  I caught a peep at another soldier, who was
+flirting with a personable Flemish scullery maid behind the protection
+of the kitchen wall.  The proprietress and her daughters stood at the
+door to wave us good-by and to wish us, with apparent sincerity, a safe
+journey down into France, and a safe return.
+
+To drop from this cozy, peaceful place into the town of Dinant again was
+to drop from a small earthly paradise into a small earthly hell.
+Somewhere near the middle of the little perdition our cavalry captain
+pointed to a shell of a house.
+
+"A fortnight ago," he told us, "we found a French soldier in that house
+--or under it, rather.  He had been there four weeks, hiding in the
+basement.  He took some food with him or found some there; at any rate,
+he managed to live four weeks.  He was blind, and nearly deaf, too, when
+we found out where he was and dug him out--but he is still alive."
+
+One of us said we should like to have a look at a man who had undergone
+such an entombment.
+
+"No, you wouldn't," said the captain; "for he is no very pleasant sight.
+He is a slobbering idiot."
+
+In the Grand Place, near the shell-riddled Church of Notre Dame--built
+by the Bishops in the thirteenth century, restored by the Belgian
+Government in the nineteenth, and destroyed by the German guns in the
+twentieth--a long queue of women wound past the doorway of a building
+where German noncommissioned officers handed out to each applicant a big
+loaf of black soldier bread.
+
+"Oh, yes; we feed the poor devils," the German commandant, an elderly,
+scholarly looking man of the rank of major, said to us when he had come
+up to be introduced.  "When our troops entered this town the men of the
+lower classes took up arms and fired at our soldiers; so the soldiers
+burned all their houses and shot all the men who came out of those
+houses.
+
+"All this occurred before I was sent here.  Had I been the commander of
+the troops, I should have shot them without mercy.  It is our law for
+war times, and these Belgian civilians must be taught that they cannot
+fire on German soldiers and not pay for it with their lives and their
+homes.  With the women and children, however, the case is different. On
+my own responsibility I am feeding the destitute.  Every day I give away
+to these people between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred loaves of
+bread; and I give to some who are particularly needy rations of tea and
+sugar and coffee and rice.  Also, I sell to the butcher shops fresh and
+salt meat from our military stores at cost, requiring only that they, in
+turn, shall sell it at no more than a fair profit.  So long as I am
+stationed here I shall do this, for I cannot let them starve before my
+eyes.  I myself have children."
+
+It was like escaping from a pesthouse to cross the one bridge of Dinant
+that remained standing on its piers, and go winding down the lovely
+valley, overtaking and passing many German wagon trains, the stout,
+middle-aged soldier drivers of which drowsed on their seats; passing
+also one marching battalion of foot-reserves, who, their officers
+concurring, broke from the ranks to beg newspapers and cigars from us.
+On the mountain ash the bright red berries dangled in clumps like
+Christmas bells, and some of the leaves of the elm still clung to their
+boughs; so that the wide yellow road was dappled like a wild-cat's back
+with black splotches of shadow.  Only when we curved through some
+village that had been the scene of a skirmish or a reprisal did the
+roofless shells and the toppled walls of the houses, standing gaunt and
+ugly in the sharp sunlight, make us realize that we were still in the
+war tracks.
+
+As nearly as we could tell from our brief scrutiny a great change had
+come over the dwellers in southern Belgium.  In August they had been
+buoyant and confident of the ultimate outcome and very proud of the
+behavior of their little army.  Even when the Germans burst through the
+frontier defenses and descended on them in innumerable swarms they were,
+for the most part, not daunted by those evidences of the invaders'
+numerical superiority and of their magnificent equipment.  The more
+there were of the Germans the fewer of them there would be to come back
+when the Allies, over the French border, fell on them.  This we
+conceived to be the mental attitude of the villagers and the peasants;
+but now they were different.  The difference showed in all their outward
+aspects--in their gaits; in their drooped shoulders and half-averted
+faces; and, most of all, in their eyes.  They had felt the weight of the
+armed hand, and they must have heard the boast, filtering down from the
+officers to the men, and from the men to the native populace, that,
+having taken their country, the Germans meant to keep it; that Belgium,
+ceasing to be Belgium, would henceforth be set down on the map as a part
+of Greater Prussia.
+
+Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may
+reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.
+Yet a national spirit is harder to kill than a national boundary--so the
+students of these things say.  A little flash of flaming hate from the
+dead ashes of things; a quick, darting glance of defiance; a hissed word
+from a seemingly subdued man or woman; a shrill, hostile whoop from a
+ragged youngster behind a hedge--things such as these showed us that the
+courage of the Belgians was not dead.  It had been crushed to the
+ground, but it had not been torn up by the roots.  The roots went down
+too far.  The under dog had secret dreams of the day to come, when he
+should not be underneath, but on top.
+
+Even had there been no abandoned custom-houses to convince us of it, we
+should have known when we crossed from southern Belgium into northern
+France; for in France the proportion of houses that had suffered in
+punitive attacks was, compared with Belgium, as one to ten.  Understand,
+I am speaking of houses that had been deliberately burned in punishment,
+and not of houses that stood in the way of the cannon and the rapid-fire
+guns, and so underwent partial or complete destruction as the result of
+an accidental yet inevitable and unavoidable process.  Of these last
+France, to the square mile, could offer as lamentably large a showing as
+Belgium; but buildings that presented indubitable signs of having been
+fired with torches rather than with shells were few.
+
+Explaining this and applauding it, Germans of high rank said it
+presented direct and confirmatory proof of their claim that sheer wanton
+reprisals were practically unknown in their system of warfare.  Perhaps
+I can best set forth the German attitude in this regard by quoting a
+general whom we interviewed on the subject:
+
+"We do not destroy for the pleasure it gives us.  We destroy only when
+it is necessary. The French rural populace are more rational, more
+tractable and much less turbulent than the Belgians.  To a much greater
+degree than the Belgians they have refrained from acts against our men
+that would call for severe retaliatory measures on our part.
+Consequently we have spared the houses and respected the property of the
+French noncombatants."
+
+Personally I had a theory of my own.  So far as our observations went,
+the people living immediately on both sides of the line were an
+interrelated people, using the same speech and being much alike in
+temperament, manners and mode of conduct.  I reached the private
+conclusion that, because of the chorus of protest that arose from all
+the neutral countries, and particularly from the United States, against
+the severities visited on Belgium in August and September, the word went
+forth to the German forces in the field that the scheme of punishment
+for offenders who violated the field code should be somewhat softened
+and relaxed.  However, that is merely a personal theory.  I may be
+absolutely wrong about it.  The German general who interpreted the
+meaning of the situation may have been absolutely right about it.
+Certainly the physical testimony was on his side.
+
+Also, it seemed to me, the psychology of the people--particularly of the
+womenfolk--in northern France was not that of their neighboors over the
+frontier.  In a trade way the small shopkeepers here faced ruin; the
+Belgians already had been ruined.  The Frenchwomen, whose sons and
+brothers and husbands and fathers were at the front, walked in the
+shadow of a great fear, as you might tell by a look into the face of any
+one of them.  They were as peppercorns between the upper millstone and
+the nether, and the sound of the crunching was always in their ears,
+even though their turn to be ground up had not yet come.
+
+For the Belgian women, however, the worst that might befall had already
+happened to them; their souls could be wrung no more; they had no terror
+of the future, since the past had been so terrible and the present was a
+living desolation of all they counted worth while.  You might say the
+Frenchwomen dreaded what the Belgians endured.  The refilled cup was at
+the lips of France; Belgium had drained it dry.
+
+Yet in both countries the women generally manifested the same steadfast
+and silent patience.  They said little; but their eyes asked questions.
+In the French towns we saw how bravely they strove to carry on their
+common affairs of life, which were so sadly shaken and distorted out of
+all normality by the earthquake of war.
+
+For currency they had small French coins and strange German coins, and
+in some places futile-looking, little green-and-white slips, issued by
+the municipality in denominations of one franc and two francs and five
+francs, and redeemable in hard specie "three months after the
+declaration of peace." For wares to sell they had what remained of their
+depleted stocks; and for customers, their friends and neighbors, who
+looked forward to commercial ruin, which each day brought nearer to them
+all.  Outwardly they were placid enough, but it was not the placidity of
+content.  It bespoke rather a dumb, disciplined acceptance by those who
+have had fatalism literally thrust on them as a doctrine to be
+practiced.
+
+Looking back on it I can recall just one woman I saw in France who
+maintained an unquenchable blitheness of spirit.  She was the little
+woman who managed the small cafe in Maubeuge where we ate our meals.
+Perhaps her frugal French mind rejoiced that business remained so good,
+for many officers dined at her table and, by Continental standards, paid
+her well and abundantly for what she fed them; but I think a better
+reason lay in the fact that she had within her an innate buoyancy which
+nothing--not even war--could daunt.
+
+She was one of those women who remain trig and chic though they be
+slovens by instinct.  Her blouse was never clean, but she wore it with
+an air.  Her skirt testified that skillets spit grease; but in it she
+somehow looked as trim as a trout fly.  Even the hole in her stocking
+gave her piquancy; and she had wonderful black hair, which probably had
+not been combed properly for a month, and big, crackling black eyes.
+They told us that one day, a week or two before we came, she had been
+particularly cheerful--so cheerful that one of her patrons was moved to
+inquire the cause of it.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I am quite content with life to-day.  I have word that
+my husband is a prisoner.  Now he is out of danger and you Germans will
+have to feed him--and he is a great eater! If you starve him then I
+shall starve you."
+
+At breakfast Captain Mannesmann, who was with us, asked her in his best
+French for more butter.  She paused in her quick, bird-like movements--
+for she was waitress, cook, cashier, manager and owner, all rolled into
+one--and cocking a saucy, unkempt head at him asked that the question be
+repeated.  This time, in his efforts to be understood, he stretched his
+words out so that unwittingly his voice took on rather a whining tone.
+
+"Well, don't cry about it!" she snapped.  "I'll see what I can do."
+
+Returning from the battle front our itinerary included a long stretch of
+the great road that runs between Paris and Brussels, a road much favored
+formerly by auto tourists, but now used almost altogether for military
+purposes.  Considering that we traversed a corner of the stage of one of
+the greatest battles thus far waged--Mons--and that this battle had
+taken place but a few weeks before, there were remarkably few evidences
+remaining of it.
+
+With added force we remarked a condition that had given us material for
+wonderment in our earlier journeyings.  Though a retreating army and an
+advancing army, both enormous in size, had lately poured through the
+country, the houses, the farms and the towns were almost undamaged.
+
+Certain contrasts which took on a heightened emphasis by reason of their
+brutal abruptness, abounded all over Belgium.  You passed at a step, as
+it were, from a district of complete and irreparable destruction to one
+wherein all things were orderly and ordered, and much as they should be
+in peaceful times.  Were it not for the stagnated towns and the
+depression that berode the people, one would hardly know these areas had
+lately been overrun by hostile soldiers and now groaned under enormous
+tithes.  In isolated instances the depression had begun to lift.
+Certain breeds of the polyglot Flemish race have, it appears, an almost
+unkillable resilience of temper; but in a town a mile away all those
+whom we met would be like dead people who walked.
+
+Also, there were many graves.  If we passed a long ridged mound of clay
+in a field, unmarked except by the piled-up clods, we knew that at this
+spot many had fought and many had fallen; but if, as occurred
+constantly, one separate mound or a little row of separate mounds was at
+the roadside, that probably meant a small skirmish.  Such a grave almost
+always was marked by a little wooden cross, with a name penciled on it;
+and often the comrades of the dead man had hung his cap on the upright
+of the cross.  If it were a French cap or a Belgian the weather would
+have worn it to a faded blue-and-red wisp of worsted.  The German
+helmets stood the exposure better.  They retained their shape.
+
+On a cross I saw one helmet with a bullet hole right through the center
+of it in front. Sometimes there would be flowers on the mound, faded
+garlands of field poppies and wreaths of withered wild vines; and by the
+presence of these we could tell that the dead man's mates had time and
+opportunity to accord him greater honor than usually is be-stowed on a
+soldier killed in an advance or during a retreat.
+
+Mons was reached soon, looking much as I imagine Mons must always have
+looked; and then, after a few stretching and weary leagues, Brussels--to
+my mind the prettiest and smartest of the capital cities of Europe, not
+excluding Paris.  I first saw Brussels when it was as gay as carnival--
+that was in mid-August; and, though Liege had fallen and Namur was
+falling, and the German legions were eating up the miles as they hurried
+forward through the dust and smoke of their own making, Brussels still
+floated her flags, built her toy barricades, and wore a gay face to mask
+the panic clutching at her nerves.
+
+Getting back four days later I found her beginning to rally from the
+shock of the invasion. Her people, relieved to find that the enemy did
+not mean to mistreat noncombatants who obeyed his code of laws, were
+going about their affairs in such odd hours as they could spare from
+watching the unending gray freshet that roared and pounded through their
+streets.  The flags were down and the counterfeit light-heartedness was
+gone; but essentially she was the same Brussels.
+
+Coming now, however, six weeks later, I found a city that had been
+transformed out of her own customary image by captivity and hunger and
+hard-curbed resentment.  The pulse of her life seemed hardly to beat at
+all.  She lay in a coma, flashing up feverishly sometimes at false
+rumors of German repulses to the southward.
+
+Only the day before we arrived a wild story got abroad among the
+starvelings in the poorer quarters that the Russians had taken Berlin
+and had swept across Prussia and were now pushing forward, with an
+irresistible army, to relieve Brussels.  So thousands of the deluded
+populace went to a bridge on the eastern outskirts of the town to catch
+the first glimpse of the victorious oncoming Russians; and there they
+stayed until nightfall, watching and hoping and--what was more pitiable
+--believing.
+
+From what I saw of him I judged that the military governor of Brussels,
+Major Bayer, was not only a diplomat but a kindly and an engaging
+gentleman.  Certainly he was wrestling most manfully, and I thought
+tactfully, with a difficult and a dangerous situation.  For one thing,
+he was keeping his soldiers out of sight as much as possible without
+relaxing his grip on the community.  He did this, he said, to reduce the
+chances of friction between his men and the people; for friction might
+mean a spark and a spark might mean a conflagration, and that would mean
+another and greater Louvain.  We could easily understand that small
+things might readily grow into great and serious troubles.  Even the
+most docile-minded man would be apt to resent in the wearer of a hated
+uniform what he might excuse as over-officiousness or love of petty
+authority were the offender a policeman of his own nationality.
+Brooding over their own misfortunes had worn the nerves of these
+captives to the very quick.
+
+In any event, be the outcome of this war what it may, I do not believe
+the Belgians can ever be molded, either by kindness or by sternness,
+into a tractable vassal race. German civilization I concede to be a
+magnificent thing--for a German; but it seems to press on an alien neck
+as a galling yoke.  Belgium under Berlin rule would be, I am sure,
+Alsace and Lorraine all over again on a larger scale, and an unhappier
+one.  She would never, in my humble opinion, be a star in the Prussian
+constellation, but always a raw sore in the Prussian side.
+
+In Major Bayer's office I saw the major stamp an order that turned over
+to the acting burgomaster ten thousand bags of flour for distribution
+among the more needy citizens. We were encouraged to believe that this
+was by way of a free gift from the German Government.  It may have been
+made without payment or promise of payment.  In regard to that I cannot
+say positively; but this was the inference we drew from the statements
+of the German officers who took part in the proceeding.  As for the
+acting burgomaster, he stood through the scene silent and inscrutable,
+saying nothing at all.  Possibly he did not understand; the
+conversation--or that part of it which concerned us--was carried on
+exclusively in English.  His face, as he bowed to accept the certified
+warrant for the flour, gave us no hint of his mental processes.
+
+Major Bayer claimed a professional kinship with those of us who were
+newspaper men, as he was the head of the Boy Scout movement in Germany
+and edited the official organ of the Boy Scouts.  He had a squad of his
+scouts on messenger duty at his headquarters--smart, alert-looking
+youngsters.  They seemed to me to be much more competent in their
+department than were the important-appearing German Secret Service
+agents who infested the building.  The Germans may make first-rate
+spies--assuredly their system of espionage was well organized before the
+war broke out--but I do not think they are conspicuous successes as
+detectives: their methods are so delightfully translucent.
+
+Major Bayer had been one of the foremost German officers to set foot on
+Belgian soil after the severance of friendly relations between the two
+countries.  "I believe," he said, "that I heard the first shot fired in
+this war.  It came from a clump of trees within half an hour after our
+advance guard crossed the boundary south of Aachen, and it wounded the
+leg of a captain who commanded a company of scouts at the head of the
+column. Our skirmishers surrounded the woods and beat the thickets, and
+presently they brought forth the man who had fired the shot.  He was
+sixty years old, and he was a civilian. Under the laws of war we shot
+him on the spot.  So you see probably the first shot fired in this war
+was fired at us by a franc-tireur.  By his act he had forfeited his
+life, but personally I felt sorry for him; for I believe, like many of
+his fellow countrymen who afterward committed such offenses, he was
+ignorant of the military indefensibility of his attack on us and did not
+realize what the consequences would be.
+
+"I am sure, though, that the severity with which we punished these
+offenses at the outset was really merciful, for only by killing the
+civilians who fired on us, and by burning their houses, could we bring
+home to thousands of others the lesson that if they wished to fight us
+they must enlist in their own army and come against us in uniforms, as
+soldiers."
+
+Within the same hour we were introduced to Privy Councilor Otto von
+Falke, an Austrian by birth, but now, after long service in Cologne and
+Berlin, promoted to be Director of Industrial Arts for Prussia.  He had
+been sent, he explained, by order of his Kaiser, to superintend the
+removal of historic works of art from endangered churches and other
+buildings, and turn them over to the curator of the Royal Belgian
+Gallery, at Brussels, for storage in the vaults of the museum until such
+time as peace had been restored and they might be returned with safety
+to their original positions.
+
+"So you see, gentlemen," said Professor von Falke, "the Germans are not
+despoiling Belgium of its wealth of pictures and statues.  We are taking
+pains to preserve and perpetuate them.  They belong to Belgium--not to
+us; and we have no desire to take them away.  Certainly we are not
+vandals who would wantonly destroy the splendid things of art, as our
+enemies have claimed."
+
+He was plainly a sincere man and he was much in love with his work;
+that, too, was easy to see.  Afterward, though, the thought came to us
+that, if Belgium was to become a German state by right of seizure and
+conquest, he was saving these masterpieces of Vandyke and Rubens, not
+for Belgium, but for the greater glory of the Greater Empire.
+
+However, that was beside the mark.  What at the moment seemed to us of
+more consequence even than rescuing holy pictures was that all about us
+were sundry hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who did not
+need pictures, but food.  You had only to look at them in the streets to
+know that their bellies felt the grind of hunger. Famine knocked at half
+the doors in that city of Brussels, and we sat in the glittering cafe of
+the Palace Hotel and talked of pictures!
+
+We called on Minister Brand Whitlock, whom we had not seen--McCutcheon
+and I--since the Sunday afternoon a month and a half before when we two
+left his official residence in a hired livery rig for a ride to
+Waterloo, which ride extended over a thousand miles, one way and
+another, and carried us into three of the warring countries.  Mention of
+this call gives me opportunity to say in parenthesis, so to speak, that
+if ever a man in acutely critical circumstances kept his head, and did a
+big job in a big way, and reflected credit at a thousand angles on
+himself and the country that had the honor to be served by him, that man
+was Brand Whitlock.  To him, a citizen of another nation, the people of
+forlorn Brussels probably owe more than to any man of their own race.
+
+Grass was sprouting from between the cobbles of the streets in the
+populous residential districts through which we passed on the way from
+the American Ministry to our next stopping place.  Viewed at a short
+distance each vista of empty street had a wavy green beard on its face;
+and by this one might judge to what a low ebb the commerce and the
+pleasure of the city had fallen since its occupation.  There was one
+small square where goats and geese might have been pastured.  It looked
+as though weeks might have passed since wagon wheels had rolled over
+those stones; and the town folks whose houses fronted on the little
+square lounged in their doorways, with idle hands thrust into their
+pockets, regarding us with lackluster, indifferent eyes.  It may have
+been fancy, but I thought nearly all of them looked griped of frame and
+that their faces seemed drawn. Seeing them so, you would have said that,
+with them, nothing mattered any more.
+
+We saw a good many people, though, who were taking for the moment an
+acute and uneasy interest in their own affairs, at the big city prison,
+where we spent half an hour or so.  Here, in a high-walled courtyard, we
+found upward of two hundred offenders against small civic regulations,
+serving sentences ranging in length from seven days to thirty. Perhaps
+one in three was a German soldier, and probably one in ten was a woman
+or a girl; the rest were male citizens of all ages, sizes and social
+grading, a few Congo negroes being mixed in.  Most of the time they
+stayed in their cells, in solitary confinement; but on certain
+afternoons they might take the air and see visitors in the bleak and
+barren inclosure where they were now herded together.
+
+By common rumor in Brussels the Germans were shooting all persons caught
+secretly peddling copies of French or English papers or unauthorized and
+clandestine Belgian papers; since only orthodox German papers were
+permitted to be sold.  The Germans themselves took no steps to deny
+these stories, but in the prison we found a large collection of forlorn
+newsdealers.  Having been captured with the forbidden wares in their
+possession, they had mysteriously vanished from the ken of their
+friends; but they had not been "put against the wall," as they say in
+Europe.  They had been given fourteen days apiece, with a promise of six
+months if they transgressed a second time.
+
+One little man, with the longest and sleekest and silkiest black
+whiskers I have seen in many a day, recognized us as Americans and drew
+near to tell us his troubles in a confidential whisper.  By his bleached
+indoor complexion and his manners anyone would have known him for a
+pastry cook or a hairdresser.  A hairdresser he was; and in a better day
+than this, not far remote, had conducted a fashionable establishment on
+a fashionable boulevard.
+
+"Ah, I am in one very sad state," he said in his twisted English.  "I
+start for Ostend to take winter garments for my two small daughters,
+which are there at school, and they arrest me--these Germans--and keep
+me two days in a cowshed, and then bring me back here and put me here in
+this so-terrible-a-place for two weeks; and all for nothing at all."
+
+"Didn't you have a pass to go through the lines?" I asked.  "Perhaps
+that was it."
+
+"I have already a pass," he said; "but when they search me they find in
+my pockets letters which I am taking to people in Ostend.  I do not know
+what is in those letters. People ask me to take them to friends of
+theirs in Ostend and I consent, not knowing it is against the rule.
+They read these letters--the Germans--and say I am carrying news to
+their enemies; and they become very enrage at me and lock me up.  Never
+again will I take letters for anybody anywhere.
+
+"Oh, sirs, if you could but see the food we eat here! For dinner we have
+a stew--oh, such a stew!--and for breakfast only bread and coffee who is
+not coffee!" And with both hands he combed his whiskers in a despair
+that was comic and yet pitiful.
+
+He was standing there, still combing, as we came away.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter 16
+
+Louvain the Forsaken
+
+
+It was Sunday when I saw Louvain in the ashes of her desolation.  We
+were just back then from the German trenches before Antwerp; and the
+hollow sounds of the big guns which were fired there at spaced intervals
+came to our ears as we rode over the road leading out from Brussels,
+like the boomings of great bells.  The last time I had gone that way the
+country was full of refugees fleeing from burning villages on beyond.
+Now it was bare, except for a few baggage trains lumbering along under
+escort of shaggy gray troopers.  Perhaps I should say they were gray-
+and-yellow troopers, for the plastered mud and powdered dust of three
+months of active campaigning had made them of true dirt color.
+
+Oh, yes; I forgot one other thing: We overtook a string of wagons fitted
+up as carryalls and bearing family parties of the burghers to Louvain to
+spend a day among the wreckage.  There is no accounting for tastes.  If
+I had been a Belgian the last thing I should want my wife and my baby to
+see would be the ancient university town, the national cradle of the
+Church, in its present state.  Nevertheless there were many
+excursionists in Louvain that day.
+
+The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses
+from as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from
+Brussels.  They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain
+ranges of waste, and they mined in the debris mounds for souvenirs.
+Altogether, I suppose some of them regarded it as a kind of picnic.
+Personally I should rather go to a morgue for a picnic than to Louvain
+as it looks to-day.  I tried hard, both in Germany among the German
+soldiers and in Belgium among the Belgians, to get at the truth about
+Louvain.  The Germans said the outbreak was planned, and that firing
+broke out at a given signal in various quarters of the town; that, from
+windows and basements and roofs, bullets rained on them; and that the
+fighting continued until they had smoked the last of the inhabitants
+from their houses with fire and put them to death as they fled.  The
+Belgians proclaimed just as stoutly that, mistaking an on marching
+regiment for enemies, the Germans fired on their own people; and then,
+in rage at having committed such an error and to cover it up, they
+turned on the townspeople and mixed massacre with pillaging and burning
+for the better part of a night and a day.
+
+I could, I think, sense something of the viewpoint of each.  To the
+Belgian, a German in his home or in his town was no more than an armed
+housebreaker.  What did he care for the code of war? He was not
+responsible for the war.  He had no share in framing the code.  He took
+his gun, and when the chance came he fired---and fired to kill.
+Perhaps, at first, he did not know that by that same act he forfeited
+his life and sacrificed his home and jeopardized the lives and homes of
+all his neighbors.  Perhaps in the blind fury of the moment he did not
+much care.
+
+Take the German soldier: He had proved he was ready to meet his enemy in
+the open and to fight him there.  When his comrade fell at his side,
+struck down by an unseen, skulking foe, who lurked behind a hedge or a
+chimney, he saw red and he did red deeds.  That in his reprisals he went
+farther than some might have gone under similar conditions is rather to
+have been expected.  In point of organization, in discipline, and in the
+enactment of a terribly stern, terribly deadly course of conduct for
+just such emergencies, his masters had gone farther than the heads of
+any modern army ever went before.  You see, all the laboriously built-up
+ethics of civilized peace came into direct conflict with the bloody
+ethics of war, which are never civilized, and which frequently are born
+in the instant and molded on the instant to suit the purposes of those
+who create them.  And Louvain is perhaps the most finished and perfect
+example we have in this world to-day to show the consequences of such a
+clash.
+
+I am not going to try to describe Louvain.  Others have done that
+competently.  The Belgians were approximately correct when they said
+Louvain had been destroyed.  The Germans were technically right when
+they said not over twenty per cent of its area had been reduced; but
+that twenty per cent included practically the whole business district,
+practically all the better class of homes, the university, the
+cathedral, the main thoroughfares, the principal hotels and shops and
+cafes.  The famous town hall alone stood unscathed; it was saved by
+German soldiers from the common fate of all things about it.  What
+remained, in historic value and in physical beauty, and even in tangible
+property value, was much less than what was gone forever.
+
+I sought out the hotel near the station where we had stayed, as enforced
+guests of the German army, for three days in August. Its site was a
+leveled gray mass, sodden, wrecked past all redemption; ruined beyond
+all thought of salvage.  I looked for the little inn at which we had
+dined.  Its front wall littered the street and its interior was a jumble
+of worthlessness.  I wondered again as I had wondered many times before
+what had become of its proprietor--the dainty, gentle little woman whose
+misshapen figure told us she was near the time for her baby.
+
+I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk cafe where we
+sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation--August
+twenty-first, I think, was the date--and watched the sun go out in
+eclipse like a copper disk.  We did not know it then, but it was
+Louvain's bloody eclipse we saw presaged that day in the suddenly
+darkened heavens.  Even the lines of the sidewalks were loSt. The road
+was piled high with broken, fire-smudged masonry.  The building behind
+was a building no longer.  It was a husk of a house, open to the sky,
+backless and front-less, and fit only to tumble down in the next high
+wind.
+
+As we stood before the empty railroad station, in what I veritably
+believe to be the forlornest spot there is on this earth, a woman in a
+shawl came whining to sell us postal cards, on which were views of the
+desolation that was all about us.
+
+"Please buy some pictures," she said in French.  "My husband is dead."
+
+"When did he die?" one of us asked.
+
+She blinked, as though trying to remember.
+
+"That night," she said as though there had never been but one night.
+"They killed him then--that night." "Who killed him?" "They did."
+
+She pointed in the direction of the square fronting the station.  There
+were German soldiers where she pointed--both living ones and dead ones.
+The dead ones, eighty-odd of them, were buried in two big crosswise
+trenches, in a circular plot that had once been a bed of ornamental
+flowers surrounding the monument of some local notable.  The living ones
+were standing sentry duty at the fence that flanked the railroad tracks
+beyond.
+
+"They did," she said; "they killed him! Will you buy some postal cards,
+m'sieur? All the best pictures of the ruins!"
+
+She said it flatly, without color in her voice, or feeling or emotion.
+She did not, I am sure, flinch mentally as she looked at the Germans.
+Certainly she did not flinch visibly.  She was past flinching, I
+suppose.
+
+The officer in command of the force holding the town came, just before
+we started, to warn us to beware of bicyclists who might be encountered
+near Tirlemont.
+
+"They are all franc-tireurs--those Belgians on wheels," he said.  "Some
+of them are straggling soldiers, wearing uniforms under their other
+clothes.  They will shoot at you and trust to their bicycles to get
+away.  We've caught and killed some of them, but there are still a few
+abroad.  Take no chances with them.  If I were in your place I should be
+ready to shoot first."
+
+We asked him how the surviving populace of Louvain was behaving.
+
+"Oh, we have them--like that!" he said with a laugh, and clenched his
+hand up in a knot of knuckles to show what he meant.  "They know better
+than to shoot at a German soldier now; but if looks would kill we'd all
+be dead men a hundred times a day." And he laughed again.
+
+Of course it was none of our business; but it seemed to us that if we
+were choosing a man to pacify and control the ruined people of ruined
+Louvain this square-headed, big-fisted captain would not have been our
+first choice.
+
+It began to rain hard as our automobile moved through the wreckage-
+strewn street which, being followed, would bring us to the homeward
+road--home in this instance meaning Germany.  The rain, soaking into the
+debris, sent up a sour, nasty smell, which pursued us until we had
+cleared the town.  That exhalation might fully have been the breath of
+the wasted place, just as the distant, never-ending boom of the guns
+might have been the lamenting voice of the war-smitten land itself.
+
+I remember Liege best at this present distance by reason of a small
+thing that occurred as we rode, just before dusk, through a byway near
+the river.  In the gloomy, wet Sunday street two bands of boys were
+playing at being soldiers.  Being soldiers is the game all the children
+in Northern Europe have played since the first of last August.
+
+From doorways and window sills their lounging elders watched these Liege
+urchins as they waged their mimic fight with wooden guns and wooden
+swords; but, while we looked on, one boy of an inventive turn of mind
+was possessed of a great idea.  He proceeded to organize an execution
+against a handy wall, with one small person to enact the role of the
+condemned culprit and half a dozen others to make up the firing squad.
+
+As the older spectators realized what was afoot a growl of dissent
+rolled up and down the street; and a stout, red-faced matron, shrilly
+protesting, ran out into the road and cuffed the boys until they broke
+and scattered.  There was one game in Liege the boys might not play.
+
+The last I saw of Belgium was when I skirted her northern frontier,
+making for the seacoast. The guns were silent now, for Antwerp had
+surrendered; and over all the roads leading up into Holland refugees
+were pouring in winding streams.  They were such refugees as I had seen
+a score of times before, only now there were infinitely more of them
+than ever before: men, women and children, all afoot; all burdened with
+bags and bundles; all dressed in their best clothes--they did well to
+save their best, since they could save so little else--all or nearly all
+bearing their inevitable black umbrellas.
+
+They must have come long distances; but I marked that none of them
+moaned or complained, or gave up in weariness and despair.  They went on
+and on, with their weary backs bent to their burdens and their weary
+legs trembling under them; and we did not know where they were going--
+and they did not know.  They just went.  What they must face before them
+could not equal what they left behind them; so they went on.
+
+That poor little rag doll, with its head crushed in the wheel tracks,
+does not after all furnish such a good comparison for Belgium, I think,
+as I finish this tale; for it had sawdust insides--and Belgium's vitals
+are the vitals of courage and patience.
+
+
+
+
+
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