all.

It isn't, of course, an ideal way of working--not like putting on a hat
and strolling out to war, as one sometimes could do in the early weeks
in Belgium and France. The front is a big and rather accidental place,
however--you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back
something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of the war.
Our moment came in the German trenches before La Bassee, when, with the
English so near that you could have thrown a baseball into their
trenches, both sides began to toss dynamite bombs at each other.

We had come across to Cologne on the regular night express, shifted to a
military train, and so on through Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the
next morning's train down to Lille. Armentieres was only eight miles
away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way to the south Neuve Chapelle, where
the English offensive had first succeeded, then been thrown back only a
few days before.

Spring had come over night, the country was green, sparkling with canals
and little streams, and the few Belgian peasants left were trying to put
it in shape for summer. A few were ploughing with horses, others
laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we
passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow. Every tree in this country,
where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled with white spots
where branches had been trimmed away, and below the timber was piled--
heavy logs for lumber, smaller ones cut into firewood--the very twigs
piled as carefully as so many stacks of celery.

So fresh and neat and clean-swept did it seem .in that soft sunshine
that one forgot how empty it was--so empty and repressed that one awoke
startled to see three shaggy farm horses galloping off as the train
rolled by, kicking up their heels as if they never had heard of war. It
seemed frivolous, almost impertinent, and the landsturm officer, leaning
in the open window beside me in the passageway, thinking perhaps of his
own home across the Rhine, laughed and breathed a deep-chested
"Kolossal!" We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that curious
look of a run-down clock. On the outskirts of one town, half a dozen
little children stopped spinning tops in the road to demand tribute from
the train. They were pinched little children, with the worried,
prematurely old faces of factory children, and they begged insistently,
almost irritably, as if payment was long overdue. Good-natured soldi