his eyes. He wanted to fight, or he thought he did,
which came to the same thing.

So what I did was to take down his name and promise to send him a
completed copy of his picture in the care of his regiment and brigade;
and the last I saw of him he was half out of a car window waving good-by
to us and wishing us auf wiedersehen as he was borne away to his
ordained place.

As we rode back through the town of Maubeuge in the dusk, the company
which had sung O Strassburg in the Franco-German beer shop at the prow
of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away. I
thought I caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like
quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about
to have some luck.

In two days fourteen thousand wounded men came back through Maubeuge,
and possibly ten times that many new troops, belonging to the first
October draft of a million, passed down the line. In that week fifty
thousand wounded men returned from the German right wing alone.

He's a busy Red Glutton. There seems to be no satisfying his greed..

Chapter 15

Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe

I have told you already, how on the first battlefield of any consequence
that was visited by our party I picked up, from where it lay in the
track of the Allies' retreat, a child's rag doll. It was a grotesque
thing of print cloth, with sawdust insides. I found it at a place where
two roads met. Presumably some Belgian child, fleeing with her parents
before the German advance, dropped it there, and later a wagon or
perhaps a cannon came along and ran over it. The heavy wheel had mashed
the head of it flat.

In impressions which I wrote when the memory of the incident was vivid
in my mind, I said that, to me, this shabby little rag doll typified
Belgium. Since then I have seen many sights. Some were dramatic and
some were pathetic, and nearly all were stirring; but I still recall
quite clearly the little picture of the forks of the Belgian road, with
a background of trampled fields and sacked houses, and just at my feet
the doll, with its head crushed in and the sawdust spilled out in the
rut the ongoing army had made. And always now, when I think of this, I
find myself thinking of Belgium.

They have called her the cockpit of Europe. She is too. In wars that
were neither of her making nor her choosing she has borne the hardest
blows--a poor little buffer state thrust in between gr