I might have told him of sundry field hospitals which I had lately visited.  I could recreate in my memory, as I shall be able to recreate it as long as I live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain schoolhouse in a French town where seven men wriggled and fought in the unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men—­and boys too—­all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black night which would be their portion through all their days.  Indeed for an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which he was hastening I might have taken him by the arm and led him across two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves, and macerated out of the living image of their Maker.

But I did none of these things.  He had a picture of something uplifting and splendid before his eyes.  He wanted to fight, or he thought he did, which came to the same thing.

So what I did was to take down his name and promise to send him a completed copy of his picture in the care of his regiment and brigade; and the last I saw of him he was half out of a car window waving good-by to us and wishing us auf wiedersehen as he was borne away to his ordained place.

As we rode back through the town of Maubeuge in the dusk, the company which had sung O Strassburg in the Franco-German beer shop at the prow of the corner where the three streets met were just marching away.  I thought I caught, in the weaving gray line that flowed along like quicksilver, a glimpse of the boy who was so glad because he was about to have some luck.

In two days fourteen thousand wounded men came back through Maubeuge, and possibly ten times that many new troops, belonging to the first October draft of a million, passed down the line.  In that week fifty thousand wounded men returned from the German right wing alone.

He’s a busy Red Glutton.  There seems to be no satisfying his greed..

Chapter 15

Belgium—­The Rag Doll of Europe

I have told you already, how on the first battlefield of any consequence that was visited by our party I picked up, from where it lay in the track of the Allies’ retreat, a child’s rag doll.  It was a grotesque thing of print cloth, with sawdust insides.  I found it at a place where two roads met.  Presumably some Belgian child, fleeing with her parents before the German advance, dropped it there, and later a wagon or perhaps a cannon came along and ran over it.  The heavy wheel had mashed the head of it flat.