quick scatteration of their inch-high figures.  Quite distinctly I counted three manikins who instantly fell down flat and two others who went ahead a little way deliberately, and then lay down.  The rest darted back to the cover which they had just quit and jumped in briskly.  The five figures remained where they had dropped and became quiet.  Anyway, I could detect no motion in them.  They were just little gray strips.  Into my mind on the moment came incongruously a memory of what I had seen a thousand times in the composing room of a country newspaper where the type was set by hand.  I thought of five pica plugs lying on the printshop floor.

It was hard for me to make myself believe that I had seen human beings killed and wounded.  I can hardly believe it yet—­that those insignificant toy-figures were really and truly men.  I watched through the glass after that for possibly twenty minutes, until the summons came for lunch, but no more of the German dolls ventured out of their make-believe defenses to be blown flat by an invisible blast.

It was a picnic lunch served on board trestles under a tree behind the cover of a straw-roofed shelter tent, and we ate it in quite a peaceful and cozy picnic fashion.  Twice during the meal an orderly came with a message which he had taken off a field telephone in a little pigsty of logs and straw fifty feet away from us; but the general each time merely canted his head to hear what the whispered word might be and went on eating.  There was no clattering in of couriers, no hurried dispatching of orders this way and that.  Only, just before we finished with the meal, he got up and walked away a few paces, and there two of his aides joined him and the three of them confabbed together earnestly for a couple of minutes or so.  While so engaged they had the air about them of surgeons preparing to undertake an operation and first consulting over the preliminary details.  Or perhaps it would be truer to say they looked like civil engineers discussing the working-out of an undertaking regarding which there was interest but no uneasiness.  Assuredly they behaved not in the least as a general and aides would behave in a story book or on the stage, and when they were through they came back for their coffee and their cigars to the table where the rest of us sat.

“We are going now to a battery of the twenty-one-centimeter guns and from there to the ten-centimeters,” called out Lieutenant Geibel as we climbed aboard our cars; “and when we pass that first group of houses yonder we shall be under fire.  So if you have wills to make, you American gentlemen, you should be making them now before we start.”  A gay young officer was Lieutenant Geibel, and he just naturally would have his little joke whether or no.