y pass authorizing him
to go to Liege and to take two passengers along. He invited me to go
with him for a day's ride through the country where the very first blows
were swapped in the western theater of hostilities.

We started off in the middle of a fickle-minded shower, which first blew
puffs of wetness in our faces, like spray on a flawy day at sea, and
then broke off to let the sun shine through for a minute or two. For
two or three kilometers after clearing the town we ran through a
district that smiled with peace and groaned with plenty. On the
verandas of funny little gray roadhouses with dripping red roofs
officers sat over their breakfast coffee. A string of wagons passed us,
bound inward, full of big, white, clean-looking German pigs. A road
builder, repairing the ruts made by the guns and baggage trains, stood
aside for us to pass and pulled off his hat to us. This was Europe as
it used to be--Europe as most American tourists knew it.

We came to a tall barber pole which a careless painter had striped with
black on white instead of with red on white, and we knew by that we had
arrived at the frontier. Also, there stood alongside the pole a royal
forest ranger in green, with a queer cockaded hat on his head, doing
sentry duty. As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a
ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out
of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us,
not pears, but papers. Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few
rods by soldiers begging for papers. Some had small wooden sign-boards
bearing the word Zeitung, which they would lift and swing across the
path of an approaching automobile. I began to believe after a while
that if a man had enough newspapers in stock he could bribe his way
through the German troops clear into France.

These fellows who gathered about us now were of the Landsturm, men in
their late thirties and early forties, with long, shaggy mustaches.
Their kind forms the handle of the mighty hammer whose steel nose is
battering at France. Every third one of them wore spectacles, showing
that the back lines of the army are extensively addicted to the favorite
Teutonic sport of being nearsighted. Also, their coat sleeves
invariably were too long for them, and hid their big hands almost to the
knuckles. This is a characteristic I have everywhere noted among the
German privates. If the French soldier's c