age in repartee; and
so, with no extended argument, I got down from there and he pouched his
ironmongery. I regarded the incident as being closed and was perfectly
willing that it should remain closed.

That, however, though of consuming interest to me at the moment, was but
a detail--an exception to prove the standing rule. One place we dined
with a Rittmeister's mess; and while we sat, eating of their midday
ration of thick pea soup with sliced sausages in it, some of the younger
officers stood; also they let us stretch our wearied legs on their
mattresses, which were ranged seven in a row on the parlor floor of a
Belgian house, where from a corner a plaster statue of Joan of Arc gazed
at us with her plaster eyes.

Common soldiers offered repeatedly to share their rye-bread sandwiches
and bottled beer with us. Not once, but a dozen times, officers of
various rank let us look at their maps and use their field glasses; and
they gave us advice for reaching the zone of actual fighting and swapped
gossip with us, and frequently regretted that they had no spare mounts
or spare automobiles to loan us.

We attributed a good deal of this to the inherent kindliness of the
German gentleman's nature; but more of it we attributed to a newborn
desire on the part of these men to have disinterested journalists see
with their own eyes the scope and result of the German operations, in
the hope that the truth regarding alleged German atrocities might reach
the outside world and particularly might reach America.

Of the waste and wreckage of war; of desolated homes and shattered
villages; of the ruthless, relentless, punitive exactness with which the
Germans punished not only those civilians they accused of firing on them
but those they suspected of giving harbor or aid to the offenders; of
widows and orphans; of families of innocent sufferers, without a roof to
shelter them or a bite to stay them; of fair lands plowed by cannon
balls, and harrowed with rifle bullets, and sown with dead men's bones;
of men horribly maimed and mangled by lead and steel; of long mud
trenches where the killed lay thick under the fresh clods--of all this
and more I saw enough to cure any man of the delusion that war is a
beautiful, glorious, inspiring thing, and to make him know it for what
it is--altogether hideous and unutterably awful.

As for Uhlans spearing babies on their lances, and officers sabering
their own men, and soldiers murdering and m