nd Great Britain.
I said to him: "I'll give you a task if you have leisure. Set to
and help me hurry up your distinguished Ally in dealing with our
shipping troubles."

The old man laughed--that seemed a huge joke to him; he threw up
his hands and exclaimed--"My God! He is slow about his own
business--has always been slow--can't be anything else."

After more such banter, the nigger in his wood-pile poked his head
out: "Is there any danger," he asked, "that munitions may be
stopped?"

The Germans have been preparing northern France for German
occupation. No French are left there, of course, except women and
children and old men. They must be fed or starved or deported. The
Germans put them on trains--a whole village at a time--and run
them to the Swiss frontier. Of course the Swiss pass them on into
France. The French have their own and--the Germans will have
northern France without any French population, if this process goes
on long enough.

The mere bang! bang! frightful era of the war is passed. The
Germans are settling down to permanent business with their great
organizing machine. Of course they talk about the freedom of the
seas and such mush-mush; of course they'd like to have Paris and
rob it of enough money to pay what the war has cost them, and
London, too. But what they really want for keeps is
seacoast--Belgium and as much of the French coast as they can win.
That's really what they are out gunning for. Of course, somehow at
some time they mean to get Holland, too, and Denmark, if they
really need it. Then they'll have a very respectable seacoast--the
thing that they chiefly lack now.

More and more people are getting their nerves knocked out. I went
to a big hospital on Sunday, twenty-five miles out of London. They
showed me an enormous, muscular Tommy sitting by himself in a chair
under the trees. He had had a slight wound which quickly got well.
But his speech was gone. That came back, too, later. But then he
wouldn't talk and he'd insist on going off by himself. He's just
knocked out--you can't find out just how much gumption he has left.
That's what the war did for him: it stupefied him. Well, it's
stupefied lots of folks who have never seen a trench. That's what's
happened. Of all the men who started in with t