Which remark, considering the circumstances and other things, was sufficiently typical for all purposes, as I thought at the time and still think.  You see I had come to the place where I could understand a German soldier’s national and racial point of view, though I doubt his ability ever of understanding mine.  To him, now, old John Burns of Gettysburg, going out in his high, high hat and his long, long coat to fight with the boys would never, could never be the heroic figure which he is in the American imagination; he would have been a meddlesome malefactor deserving of immediate death.  For 1778 write it 1914, and Molly Pitcher serving at the guns would have been in no better case before a German court-martial.  I doubt whether a Prussian Stonewall Jackson would give orders to kill a French Barbara Frietchie, but assuredly he would lock that venturesome old person up in a fortress where she could not hoist her country’s flag nor invite anybody to shoot her gray head.  For you must know that the German who ordinarily brims over with that emotion which, lacking a better name for it, we call sentiment, drains all the sentiment out of his soul when he takes his gun in his hand and goes to war.

Among the frowzy turnip tops two big dull gray automobiles were stranded, like large hulks in a small green sea.  Alongside them a devil’s darning-needle of a wireless mast stuck up, one hundred and odd feet, toward the sky.  It was stayed with many steel guy ropes, like the center pole of a circus top.  It was of the collapsible model and might therefore be telescoped into itself and taken down in twenty minutes, so we were informed pride-fully by the captain in charge; and from its needle-pointed tip the messages caught out of the ether came down by wire conductors to the interior of one of the stalled automobiles and there were noted down and, whenever possible, translated by two soldier-operators, who perched on wooden stools among batteries and things, for which I know not the technical names.  The spitty snarl of the apparatus filled the air for rods roundabout.  It made you think of a million gritty slate pencils squeaking over a million slates all together.  We were permitted to take up the receivers and listen to a faint scratching sound which must have come from a long way off.

Indeed the officer told us that it was a message from the enemy that we heard.

“Our men just picked it up,” he explained; “we think it must come from a French wireless station across the river.  Naturally we cannot understand it, any more than they can understand our messages—­they’re all in code, you know.  Every day or two we change our code, and I presume they do too.”

Two of our party had unshipped their cameras by now, for the pass which we carried entitled us, among other important things, to commandeer that precious fluid, gasoline, whenever needed, and to take photographs; but we were asked to make no shapshots here.  We gathered that there were certain reasons not unconnected with secret military usage why we might not take away with us plates bearing pictures of the field wireless.  In the main, though, remarkably few restrictions were laid upon us that day.  Once or twice, very casually, somebody asked us to refrain from writing about this thing or that thing which we had seen; but that was all.