and their gable ends, lacking roofs, now stood up nakedly, fretting the skyline like gigantic saw teeth.  As we were drawing out from between these twin rows of ruins we saw a German sergeant in a flower plot alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump of tall red geraniums.  That he could find time in the midst of that hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically German bit of sentimentalism.  Just then, though, he stood erect and we were better informed.  He had been talking over a military telephone, the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter snuggling beneath the geraniums.  The flowers even were being made to contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism of war.  I think, though, that it took a composite German mind to evolve that expedient.  A Prussian would bring along the telephone; a Saxon would bed it among the blossoms.

We progressed onward by a process of alternate stops and starts, through a land bearing remarkably few traces to show for its recent chastening with sword and torch, until in the middle of the blazing hot forenoon we came to Gembloux, which I think must be the place where all the flies in Belgium are spawned.  Here on a siding we lay all day, grilled in the heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger vermin, while troop trains without number passed us, hurrying along the sentry-guarded railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium.  Every box-car door made a frame for a group-picture of broad German faces and bulky German bodies.  Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers had lashed limbs of trees and big clumps of field flowers.  Also with colored chalks they had extensively frescoed the wooden walls as high up as they could reach.  The commonest legend was “On to Paris,” or for variety “To Paris Direct,” but occasionally a lighter touch showed itself.  For example, one wag had inscribed on a car door:  “Declarations of War Received Here,” and another had drawn a highly impressionistic likeness of his Kaiser, and under it had inscribed “Wilhelm II, Emperor of Europe.”

Presently as train after train, loaded sometimes with guns or supplies but usually with men, clanked by, it began to dawn upon us that these soldiers were of a different physical type from the soldiers we had seen heretofore.  They were all Germans, to be sure, but the men along the front were younger men, hard-bitten and trained down, with the face which we had begun to call the Teutonic fighting face, whereas these men were older, and of a heavier port and fuller fashion of countenance.  Also some of them wore blue coats, red-trimmed, instead of the dull gray service garb of the troops in the first invading columns.  Indeed some of them even wore a nondescript mixture of uniform and civilian garb.  They were Landwehr and Landsturm, troops of the third and fourth lines, going now to police the roads and garrison the captured towns, and hold the lines of communication open while the first line, who were picked troops, and the second line, who were reservists, pressed ahead into France.