We came through a courtyard at the north side of the building, and the courtyard was crowded with automobiles of all the known European sizes and patterns and shapes—­automobiles for scout duty, with saw-edged steel prows curving up over the drivers’ seats to catch and cut dangling wires; automobiles fitted as traveling pharmacies and needing only red-and-green lights to be regular prescription drug stores; automobile-ambulances rigged with stretchers and first-aid kits; automobiles for carrying ammunition and capable of moving at tremendous speed for tremendous distances; automobile machine guns or machine-gun automobiles, just as suits you; automobile cannon; and an automobile mail wagon, all holed inside, like honeycomb, with two field-postmen standing up in it, back to back, sorting out the contents of snugly packed pouches; and every third letter was not a letter, strictly speaking, at all, but a small flat parcel containing chocolate or cigars or handkerchiefs or socks or even light sweaters—­such gifts as might be sent to the soldiers, stamp-free, from any part of the German Empire.  I wonder how men managed to wage war in the days before the automobile.

Two waiting cars received our party and our guides and our drivers, and we went corkscrewing down the hill, traversing crooked ways that were astonishingly full of German soldiers and astonishingly free of French townspeople.  Either the citizens kept to their closed-up houses or, having run away at the coming of the enemy, they had not yet dared to return, although so far as I might tell there was no danger of their being mistreated by the gray-backs.  Reaching the plain which is below the city we streaked westward, our destination being the field wireless station.

Nothing happened on the way except that we overtook a file of slightly wounded prisoners who, having been treated at the front, were now bound for a prison in a convent yard, where they would stay until a train carried them off to Munster or Dusseldorf for confinement until the end of the war.  I counted them.—­two English Tommies, two French officers, one lone Belgian—­how he got that far down into France nobody could guess—­and twenty-eight French cannoneers and infantrymen, including some North Africans.  Every man Jack of them was bandaged either about the head or about the arms, or else he favored an injured leg as he hobbled slowly on.  Eight guards were nursing them along; their bayonets were socketed in their carbine barrels.  No doubt the magazines of the carbines were packed with those neat brass capsules which carry doses of potential death; but the guards, except for the moral effect of the thing, might just as well have been bare-handed.  None of the prisoners could have run away even had he been so minded.  The poor devils were almost past walking, let alone running.  They wouldn’t even look up as we went by them.