his
leg by pinching it. This was especially so after inaction had put his
extremities to sleep while the rest of him remained wide awake.

After dawn we ran slowly to Charleroi, the center of the Belgian iron
industry, in a sterile land of mines and smelters and slag-heaps, and
bleak, bare, ore-stained hillsides. The Germans had fought here, first
with organized troops of the Allies, and later, by their own telling,
with bushwhacking civilians. Whole rows of houses upon either side of
the track had been ventilated by shells or burned out with fire, and
their gable ends, lacking roofs, now stood up nakedly, fretting the
skyline like gigantic saw teeth. As we were drawing out from between
these twin rows of ruins we saw a German sergeant in a flower plot
alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump
of tall red geraniums. That he could find time in the midst of that
hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically
German bit of sentimentalism. Just then, though, he stood erect and we
were better informed. He had been talking over a military telephone,
the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter
snuggling beneath the geraniums. The flowers even were being made to
contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism of war. I think,
though, that it took a composite German mind to evolve that expedient.
A Prussian would bring along the telephone; a Saxon would bed it among
the blossoms.

We progressed onward by a process of alternate stops and starts, through
a land bearing remarkably few traces to show for its recent chastening
with sword and torch, until in the middle of the blazing hot forenoon we
came to Gembloux, which I think must be the place where all the flies in
Belgium are spawned. Here on a siding we lay all day, grilled in the
heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger vermin, while troop
trains without number passed us, hurrying along the sentry-guarded
railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium. Every box-car door made a
frame for a group-picture of broad German faces and bulky German bodies.
Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers had lashed limbs of trees
and big clumps of field flowers. Also with colored chalks they had
extensively frescoed the wooden walls as high up as they could reach.
The commonest legend was "On to Paris," or for variety "To Paris
Direct," but occasionally a lighter touch showed itself. F