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