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 _The Red Glutton
 With the German Army
 at the Front_

 BY

 IRVIN S. COBB


 [Illustration]


 HODDER AND STOUGHTON
 LONDON      NEW YORK      TORONTO




CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                                                  PAGE

 I. A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe      13

 II. To War in a Taxicab                                   27

 III. Sherman Said It                                      52

 IV. "Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter"         82

 V. Being a Guest of the Kaiser                           109

 VI. With the German Wrecking Crew                        140

 VII. The Grapes of Wrath                                 164

 VIII. Three Generals and a Cook                          198

 IX. Viewing a Battle from a Balloon                      226

 X. In the Trenches Before Rheims                         251

 XI. War de Luxe                                          262

 XII. The Rut of Big Guns in France                       294

 XIII. Those Yellow Pine Boxes                            315

 XIV. The Red Glutton                                     334

 XV. Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe                      369

 XVI. Louvain the Forsaken                                406




CHAPTER I

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 lefthand 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-Château, where the English
had been; and the hour we spent at La Bussière, on the river Sambre,
where a fight had been fought two days earlier; but Merbes-le-Château
is another story and so is la Bussière. Just after La Bussière 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 château, 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 château 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
crossties, 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 mêlée.

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 débris 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 II

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
grandsires. 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 fête 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 cafés and sat at little
round tables under awnings, drinking light drinks _à 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 aëroplane
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 sandbags, 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 gayly
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 Liège," 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 cavalryman. He was a tall, lean,
blond young man, with a little yellow mustache and high cheek-bones
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 some-way 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 reconnoissance 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 reconnoissance--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 III

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 mêlée 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
cafés 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 Hôtel 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 perplexed 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 eyewitness 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-Château, 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 stanchly 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-Château, 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 naïve, 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 ungarnered, 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 à 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 cannon 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, up-torn 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 IV

"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 Cæsar'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 taxicab but our overcoats as well. There
being nothing else to do we made ourselves comfortable along side the
Belgian Lion Café 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 Liège 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 vain-glory 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 blood-thirsty
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 Hôtel 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 V

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 OverCommander 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 to-night 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 preëmpted 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 Siegeskranz_; 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 post-office 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-à-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: "Dinner-time 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 madame 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 VI

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 scrutinising
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 Liège. 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 unhuman 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 superadult 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 sunup. 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 hammocklike 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
sight-seeing 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 Liège, 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 an 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 VII

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
boot--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 Liège, 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 Liège, 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 cafés 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 Liège. 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 Liège. 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 cafés 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 cafés 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 preëminence 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 to-night. 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 Liège 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 Liège 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 near-sighted. 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 débris; 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 soil 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 Liège, 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 over-shot 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 graverobber--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 Liège, 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 Liège 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, Liège 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.

Liège, 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 Cæsar 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.

Liège, 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 débris 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 Théâtre Royale, built after
the model of the Odéon in Paris. Two waspish rapid-fire guns stood just
within the shelter at the columns, with their black snouts pointing
this way and that to command the sweep of the three-cornered Place du
Théâtre. 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, Liège 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 Hôtel 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 Liège 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 Liège
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 VIII

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 Hôtel 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 château 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 aforetime 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
Hôtel 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 château
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 boylike 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 reënter 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 Fère 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 IX

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 shell-fire 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 clothes basket.

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 pendentwise
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 aëroplane scouts ably
reënforced 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
at 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 clothes brushes. 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 heighth 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
aërial 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 pother 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 aëroplane 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 X

IN THE TRENCHES BEFORE RHEIMS


After my balloon-riding experience what followed was in the nature of
an anticlimax--was bound to be anticlimactic. 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 Fire.

"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 aërial 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 horse-flesh 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 a 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 Café" 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 XI

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
appliquéd 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 ride 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 over-took 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 Münster or Düsseldorf 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 infinitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone,
and by the aëroplane 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 _franc-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 pridefully 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 snapshots 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 aëroplanes 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 nighttimes 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 dip 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 shell-fire 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--or 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 aëroplane 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 bemired 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 puff-balls 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
springes 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 dustface, head and eyebrows--so that he remimded 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 XII

THE RUT OF BIG GUNS IN FRANCE


Let me say at the outset of this chapter that I do not setup 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 rôle 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 Liège in the
former country and at Maubeuge in the latter.

Except for purposes of frightening noncombatants 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
aëroplane 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 Liège 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
Fräulein Bertha Krupp's engineers escorted the Fräulein'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 Liège 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
over-shot 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 Liège and again here, and I know from my own observations
that this is true. At Liège 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 reënforcements 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 débris.
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 reënforcements, 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 unvisited, 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 XIII

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
Düsseldorf 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 cortège 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 good-night 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 townspeople 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 cortège--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 hammocklike 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 aëronaut. 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 XIV

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 café
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 coöperate 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 dosed 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 can 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 ware. 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 toylike 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 bradawl 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 Fère 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 XV

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 Cæsar 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 Liège, 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 Liège 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 taxicab, 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 customhouses 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 neighbors 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 café 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, birdlike
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 bestowed 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 Liège 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 lightheartedness
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 café 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 XVI

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 over-took 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 Liège and many from
Brussels. They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain
ranges of waste, and they mined in the débris 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 cafés. 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 café 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 frontless, 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 débris, 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 Liège 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
Liège 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 rôle
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 Liège 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.