Having been an eyewitness to the causes that begot this condition and to the condition itself, I feel it my duty to tell the story as I know it.  I am trying to tell it dispassionately, without prejudice for any side and without hysteria.  I concede the same to be a difficult undertaking.

Some space back I wrote that I had been able to find in Belgium no direct proof of the mutilations, the torturings and other barbarities which were charged against the Germans by the Belgians.  Though fully a dozen seasoned journalists, both English and American, have agreed with me, saying that their experiences in this regard had been the same as mine; and though I said in the same breath that I could not find in Germany any direct evidence of the brutalities charged against the Belgians by the Germans, the prior statement was accepted by some persons as proof that my sympathy for the Belgians had been chilled through association with the Germans.  No such thing.  But what I desire now is the opportunity to say this:  In the face of the present plight of this little country we need not look for individual atrocities.  Belgium herself is the capsheaf atrocity of the war.  No matter what our nationality, our race or our sentiments may be, none of us can get away from that.

Going south into France from the German border city of Aix-la-Chapelle, our automobile carried us down the Meuse.  On the eastern bank, which mainly we followed during the first six hours of riding, there were craggy cliffs, covered with forests, which at intervals were cleft by deep ravines, where small farms clung to the sides of the steep hills.  On the opposite shore cultivated lands extended from the limit of one’s vision down almost to the water.  There they met a continuous chain of manufacturing plants, now all idle, which stretched along the river shore from end to end of the valley.  Culm and flume and stack and kiln succeeded one another unendingly, but no smoke issued from any chimney; and we noted that already weeds were springing up in the quarry yards and about the mouths of the coal pits and the doorways of the empty factories.

Considering that the Germans had to fight their way along the Meuse, driving back the French and Belgians before they trusted their columns to enter the narrow defiles, there was in the physical aspect of things no great amount of damage visible.  Stagnation, though, lay like a blight on what had been one of the busiest and most productive industrial districts in all of Europe.  Except that trains ran by endlessly, bearing wounded men north, and fresh troops and fresh supplies south, the river shore was empty and silent.

In twenty miles of running we passed just two groups of busy men.  At one place a gang of German soldiers were strengthening the temporary supports of a railroad bridge which had been blown up by the retiring forces and immediately repaired by the invaders.  In another place a company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had been sent back from the front in carload lots.  There were horses here —­a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves itself.  The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured up, or to be shot in the event that they were past mending.