ferien (Pentecost vacation), and they are sent a changing of
scene and air to get." My Luxembourg friends laughed. "Yes, yes," they
said. "That is it. Trier has a splendid climate for soldiers. The
situation is kolossal for that!"

When we passed through the hot and dusty little city it was simply
swarming with the field-gray ones--thousands upon thousands of them--new
barracks everywhere; parks of artillery; mountains of munitions and
military stores. It was a veritable base of operation, ready for war.

Now the point is that Trier is just seven miles from Wasserbillig on the
Luxembourg frontier, the place where the armed German forces entered the
neutral land on August 2, 1914.

The government and the "grande armee" of the Grand Duchess protested.
But--well, did you ever see a wren resist an eagle? The motor-van (not
the private car of Her Royal Highness, as rumor has said, but just an
ordinary panier-a-salade), which was drawn up across the road to the
capital, was rolled into the ditch. The mighty host of invaders, having
long been ready, marched triumphantly into the dismantled fortress, and
along their smooth, unlawful way to France. I had caught, in June,
angling along the little river, a passing glimpse of the preparation for
that march.

But what about things on the French side of the border in that same week
of June, 1914? Well, I can only tell what I saw. Returning to Holland by
way of Paris, I saw no soldiers in the trains, only a few scattered
members of the local garrisons at the railway stations, not a man in
arms within ten kilometres of the frontier. It seemed as if France slept
quietly at the southern edge of Luxembourg, believing that the solemn
treaty, which had made Germany respect the neutrality of that little
land even in the war of 1870, still held good to safeguard her from a
treacherous attack in the rear, through a peaceful neighbor's garden.
Longwy--the poor, old-fashioned fortress in the northeast corner of
France--had hardly enough guns for a big rabbit-shoot, and hardly enough
garrison to man the guns. The conquering Crown Prince afterward took it
almost as easily as a boy steals an apple from an unprotected orchard.
It was the first star in his diadem of glory. But Verdun, though near
by, was not the second.

From this little journey I went home to The Hague with the clear
conviction that one nation in Europe was ready for war, and wanted war,
and intended war on the first convenient