number. Over the map of Belgium we
threw ourselves. Some days we landed on the right color, on others
we saw no more than we would see at state manoeuvres. Judging by
his questions, the lay brother seems to think that the chief trouble of
the war correspondent is dodging bullets. It is not. It consists in trying
to bribe a station-master to carry you on a troop train, or in finding
forage for your horse. What wars I have seen have taken place in
spots isolated and inaccessible, far from the haunts of men. By day
you followed the fight and tried to find the censor, and at night you sat
on a cracker-box and by the light of a candle struggled to keep awake
and to write deathless prose. In Belgium it was not like that. The
automobile which Gerald Morgan, of the London Daily Telegraph, and
I shared was of surpassing beauty, speed, and comfort. It was as
long as a Plant freight-car and as yellow; and from it flapped in the
breeze more English, Belgian, French, and Russian flags than fly
from the roof of the New York Hippodrome. Whenever we sighted an
army we lashed the flags of its country to our headlights, and at sixty
miles an hour bore down upon it.

The army always first arrested us, and then, on learning our
nationality, asked if it were true that America had joined the Allies.
After I had punched his ribs a sufficient number of times Morgan
learned to reply without winking that it had. In those days the sun
shone continuously; the roads, except where we ran on the blocks
that made Belgium famous, were perfect; and overhead for miles
noble trees met and embraced. The country was smiling and
beautiful. In the fields the women (for the men were at the front) were
gathering the crops, the stacks of golden grain stretched from village
to village. The houses in these were white-washed and, the better to
advertise chocolates, liqueurs, and automobile tires, were painted a
cobalt blue; their roofs were of red tiles, and they sat in gardens of
purple cabbages or gaudy hollyhocks. In the orchards the pear-trees
were bent with fruit. We never lacked for food; always, when we lost
the trail and "checked," or burst a tire, there was an inn with fruit-trees
trained to lie flat against the wall, or to spread over arbors and
trellises. Beneath these, close by the roadside, we sat and drank red
wine, and devoured omelets and vast slabs of rye bread. At night we
raced back to the city, through twelve miles of parks, to enamelled
bathtu