eard from the
Carpathians to the Rhine, from the sea to the Alps, the anthem of arms,
the stir of destruction go up as we moved. We wrangled for the outpost
places, that when the closing of the steel ring was flashed across the
circle we might be first to see the white flag at our point.

I was fortunate--one of the three sent to see how clear the road from
Ludwigshafen to Mannheim, and to cover the river crossing.

I was off and my aeroplane rose quickly. There were no lights beyond the
Rhine. Where Mannheim used to be was darkness. The three miles between
us and the river lay motionless in the moonlight. The Rhine was tight in
ice. The batteries at the angle of the Neckar were invisible. In wonder
I came down to three hundred feet and circled, watching our men creep
tentatively up to the sharp-cut bank, hesitate, clamber down, and start
across the ice recklessly. They were not spiked, never dreaming of
getting to the ice at all.

The dark figures slipped and slid and fell. It was so still and
the moon so bright I could hear the cracks shoot across the untried
sheet and see the men's faces twisted in apprehension. They were the
only moving things. It was clear the Germans had fallen back. They
had abandoned Malstatt by night--but Mannheim--and the Rhine! It
was unbelievable. I rose and coasted down to above the Mannheim
parade-ground. There was nothing to be heard but the distant stir
of our line.

I touched. My machine ran along, bumping over hundreds of bodies
lightly covered by the new snow. I got out, stumbled over them at
my feet, felt them. They were not long dead. I looked about me at the
dark, silent city of Mannheim. A panic took me. I ran to my machine,
tried to get it off, but failed and sat numb and transfixed, vainly
groping in the darkness of my mind for the thought that would not
form, till my comrades came to me with blanched faces and bit by bit
in swift succession pieced for me the words that could not find
utterance, having never been uttered in the world's life before.

The rest--a flowing phantasmagoria that tore me too far out of human
experience, even of dream--to tell again. The thousands crumpled up
in full-dress uniform, stained and tattered, beneath the new snow of
the parade-ground, fallen at a moment, at a word, hands here and there
stiffened in salute to the flag slow moving in the graying winter's
dawn. Death we had seen,--but here in the streets and in the houses,
in all corners an