The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas.  Modern military science has wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of the old game of war.  Bands no longer play the forces into the fight—­ indeed I have seen no more bands afield with the dun-colored files of the Germans than I might count on the fingers of my two hands; and flags, except on rare show-off occasions, do not float above the heads of the columns; and officers dress as nearly as possible like common soldiers; and the courier’s work is done with much less glamour but with in-, finitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone, and by the aeroplane man, and most of all by the air currents of the wireless equipment.  We missed the gallant courier, but then the wireless was worth seeing too.

It stood in a trampled turnip field not very far beyond the ruined Porte St. Martin at the end of the Rue St. Martin, and before we came to it we passed the Monument des Instituteurs, erected in 1899—­as the inscription upon it told us—­by a grateful populace to the memory of three school teachers of Laon who, for having raised a revolt of students and civilians against the invader in the Franco-Prussian War, were taken and bound and shot against a wall, in accordance with the system of dealing with ununiformed enemies which the Germans developed hereabouts in 1870 and perfected hereabouts in 1914.  A faded wreath, which evidently was weeks old, lay at the bronze feet of the three figures.  But the institute behind the monument was an institute no longer.  It had become, over night as it were, a lazaret for the wounded.  Above its doors the Red Cross flag and the German flag were crossed—­emblems of present uses and present proprietorship.  Also many convalescent German soldiers sunned themselves upon the railing about the statue.  They seemed entirely at home.  When the Germans take a town they mark it with their own mark, as cattlemen in Texas used to mark a captured maverick; after which to all intents it becomes German.  We halted a moment here.

“That’s French enough for you,” said the young officer who was riding with us, turning in his seat to speak—­“putting up a monument to glorify three francs-tireurs.  In Germany the people would not be allowed to do such a thing.  But it is not humanly conceivable that they would have such a wish.  We revere soldiers who die for the Fatherland, not men who refuse to enlist when the call comes and yet take up arms to make a guerrilla warfare.”