behind and
the dozen wounded men in the coach with us. They had only coffee and
dry bread and, at the latter end of the long day, a few chunks of the
sausage. Some of the wounded men were pretty badly hurt, too. There
was one whose left forearm had been half shot away. His stiff fingers
protruded beyond his soiled bandages and they were still crusted with
dried blood and grained with dirt. Another had been pierced through the
jaw with a bullet. That part of his face which showed through the
swathings about his head was terribly swollen and purple with congested
blood. The others had flesh wounds, mainly in their sides or their
legs. Some of them were feverish; all of them sorely needed clean
garments for their bodies and fresh dressings for their hurts and proper
food for their stomachs. Yet I did not hear one of them complain or
groan.

With that oxlike patience of the North-European peasant breed, which
seems accentuated in these Germans in time of war, they quietly endured
what was acute discomfort for any sound man to have to endure. In some
dim, dumb fashion of their own they seemed, each one of them, to
comprehend that in the vast organism of an army at war the individual
unit does not count. To himself he may be of prime importance and first
consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a
mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm--an infinitesimal, utterly
inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought. Thus we
diagnosed their mental poses. Along toward five o'clock a goodish
string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars
seven hundred French soldiers, who had been collected at Gembloux, were
loaded. With the Frenchmen as they marched under our window went,
perhaps, twenty civilian prisoners, including two priests and three or
four subdued little men who looked as though they might be civic
dignitaries of some small Belgian town. In the squad was one big,
broad-shouldered peasant in a blouse, whose arms were roped back at the
elbows with a thick cord.

"Do you see that man?" said one of our guards excitedly, and he pointed
at the pinioned man. "He is a grave robber. He has been digging up
dead Germans to rob the bodies. They tell me that when they caught him
he had in his pockets ten dead men's fingers which he had cut off with a
knife because the flesh was so swollen he could not slip the rings off.
He will be shot, that fellow."

We looked wi