Have you ever seen three hundred thousand men and one hundred thousand horses moving in one compact, marvelous unit of organization, discipline and system?  If you have not seen it you cannot imagine what it is like.  If you have seen it you cannot tell what it is like.  In one case the conceptive faculty fails you; in the other the descriptive.  I, who have seen this sight, am not foolish enough to undertake to put it down with pencil on paper.  I think I know something of the limitations of the written English language.  What I do mean to try to do in this chapter is to record some of my impressions as I watched it.

In beginning this job I find myself casting about for comparisons to set up against the vision of a full German army of seven army corps on the march.  I think of the tales I have read and the stories I have heard of other great armies:  Alaric’s war bands and Attila’s; the First Crusade; Hannibal’s cohorts, and Alexander’s host, and Caesar’s legions; the Goths and the Vandals; the million of Xerxes—­if it was a million—­and Napoleon starting for Moscow.

It is of no use.  This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made, man-managed thing.  It seems more like a great, orderly function of Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a mighty wind.  It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly is it welded into a whole.  It is harder still to accept it as a mutable and a mortal organism, subject to the shifts of chance and mischance.

And then, on top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater army and hardly know it was there—­why, then, the brain refuses to wrestle with a computation so gigantic.  The imagination just naturally bogs down and quits.

I have already set forth in some detail how it came to pass that we went forth from Brussels in a taxicab looking for the war; and how in the outskirts of Louvain we found it, and very shortly thereafter also found that we were cut off from our return and incidentally had lost not only our chauffeur and our taxi-cab but our overcoats as well.  There being nothing else to do we made ourselves comfortable along side the Belgian Lion Cafe in the southern edge of Louvain, and for hours we watched the advance guard sliding down the road through a fog of white dust.

Each time a break came in the weaving gray lines we fancied this surely was all.  All?  What we saw there was a puny dribbling stream compared with the torrent that was coming.  The crest of that living tidal wave was still two days and many miles to the rearward.  We had seen the head and a little of the neck.  The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray centipede was as yet far behind.