As we came out a private who stood in the doorway spoke to us in fair English.  He had never been in America, but he had a brother living in East St. Louis and he wanted to know if any of us knew his brother.  This was a common experience with us.  Every third German soldier we met had a brother or a sister or somebody in America.  This soldier could not have been more than eighteen years; the down on his cheeks was like corn silk.  He told us he and his comrades were very glad to be going forward where there would be fighting.  They had had no luck yet.  There had been no fighting where they had been.  I remembered afterward that luck was the word he used.

We went back to the main street and for a distance the roar of their volleying chorus followed us.  Men and women stood at the doors of the houses along the way.  They were silent and idle.  Idleness and silence seemed always to have fallen as grim legacies upon the civilian populace of these captured towns; but the look upon their faces as they listened to the soldiers’ voices was not hard to read.  Their town was pierced by cannonballs where it was not scarified with fire; there was sorrow and the abundant cause for sorrow in every house; commerce was dead and credit was killed; and round the next turning their enemy sang his drinking song.  I judge that the thrifty Frenchman who went partner with the German stranger in the beer traffic lost popularity that day among his fellow townsmen.

We were bound for the railway station, which the Germans already had rechristened Bahnhof.  Word had been brought to us that trains of wounded men and prisoners were due in the course of the afternoon from the front, and more especially from the right wing; and in this prospect we scented a story to be written.  To reach the station we crossed the river Sambre, over a damaged bridge, and passed beneath the arched passageway of the citadel which the great Vauban built for the still greater Louis XIV, thinking, no doubt, when he built it, that it would always be potent to keep out any foe, however strong.  Next to its stupid massiveness what most impressed us this day was its utter uselessness as a protection.  The station stood just beyond the walls, with a park at one side of it, but the park had become a timber deadfall.  At the approach of the enemy hundreds of splendid trees had been felled to clear the way for gunfire from the inner defenses in the event that the Germans got by the outer circle of fortresses.  After the Germans took the forts, though, the town surrendered, so all this destruction had been futile.  There were acres of ragged stumps and, between the stumps, jungles of overlapping trunks and interlacing boughs from which the dead and dying leaves shook off in showers.  One of our party, who knew something of forestry, estimated that these trees were about forty years old.

“I suppose,” he added speculatively, “that when this war ends these people will replant their trees.  Then in another forty years or so another war will come and they will chop them all down again.  On the whole I’m rather glad I don’t live on this continent.”