d
hot food to the soldiers who fight. A good many of them have already
been killed.

"Only the other day--at La Fere I think it was--two of our cooks at
daybreak went so far forward with their wagon that they were almost
inside the enemy's lines. Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got
separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and
walked right into them. The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its
short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun,
and they threw down their guns and surrendered. The two cooks brought
their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them
stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast
coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches. They are good
men, those cooks!"

So at last I found out at second hand what one German soldier had done
to merit the bestowal of the Iron Cross. But as we came away, I was in
doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it:
I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of
the German Army in this war--the general feeding his men by thousands
into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the
pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a
coffee boiler in his hands--because it was an order.

Chapter 9

Viewing A Battle from a Balloon

She was anchored to earth in a good-sized field. Woods horizoned the
field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth.
She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from
tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter
through her middle. She was a bright yellow in color--a varnished,
oily-looking yellow--and in shape suggestive of a frankfurter.

At the end of her near the ground and on the side that was underneath
--for she swung, you understand, at an angle--a swollen protuberance
showed, as though an air bubble had got under the skin of the sausage
during the packing and made a big blister. She drooped weakly
amidships, bending and swaying this way and that; and, as we came under
her and looked up, we saw that the skin of the belly kept shrinking in
and wrinkling up, in the unmistakable pangs of acute cramp colic.

She had a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most
flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was
her normal appearanc