There was a small wine shop at the prow of a triangle of narrow streets.  It had been a wine shop.  It was now a beer shop.  There had been a French proprietor; he had a German partner now.  It had been only a few weeks—­you could not as yet measure the interval of time in terms of months—­since the Germans came and sat themselves down before Maubeuge and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter earthquakes and marched in and took it.  It had been only these few weeks; but already the Germanizing brand of the conqueror was seared deep in the galled flanks of this typically French community.  The town-hall clock was made to tick German time, which varied by an even hour from French time.  Tacked upon the door of the little cafe where we ate our meals was a card setting forth, with painful German particularity, the tariff which might properly be charged for food and for lodging and drink and what not; and it was done in German-Gothic script, all very angular and precise; and it was signed by His Excellency, the German commandant; and its prices were predicated on German logic and the estimated depth of a German wallet.  You might read a newspaper printed in German characters, if so minded; but none printed in French, whether so minded or not.

So when we entered in at the door of the little French wine shop where the three streets met, to find out who within had heart of grace to sing ‘O Strassburg, O Strassburg’, so lustily, lo and behold, it had been magically transformed into a German beer shop.  It was, as we presently learned, the only beer shop in all of Maubeuge, and the reason for that was this:  No sooner had the Germans cleared and opened the roads back across Belgium to their own frontiers than an enterprising tradesman of the Rhein country, who somehow had escaped military service, loaded many kegs of good German beer upon trucks and brought his precious cargoes overland a hundred miles and more southward.  Certainly he could not have moved the lager caravan without the consent and aid of the Berlin war office.  For all I know to the contrary he may have been financed in that competent quarter.  That same morning I had seen a field weather station, mounted on an automobile, standing in front of our lodging place just off the square.  It was going to the front to make and compile meteorological reports.  A general staff who provided weather offices on wheels and printing offices on wheels—­this last for the setting up and striking off of small proclamations and orders—­might very well have bethought themselves that the soldier in the field would be all the fitter for the job before him if stayed with the familiar malts of the Vaterland.  Believe me, I wouldn’t put it past them.