When wounded men go by there will be cheering, and some of the women are sure to raise the song of Die Wacht am Rhein; and within the cars the crippled soldiers will take up the chorus feebly.  God knows how many able-bodied soldiers already have gone west; how many maimed and crippled ones have gone east!  In the first instance the number must run up into the second million; of the latter there must have been well above two hundred thousand.

No dead come back from the front—­at least, not this way.  The Germans bury their fallen soldiers where they fall.  Regardless of his rank, the dead man goes into a trench.  If so be he died in battle he is buried, booted and dressed just as he died.  And the dead of each day must be got underground before midnight of that same day—­that is the hard-and-fast rule wherever the Germans are holding their ground or pressing forward.  There they will lie until the Judgment Day, unless their kinsfolk be of sufficient wealth and influence to find their burial places and dig them up and bring them home privily for interment.  Even so, it may be days or even weeks after a man is dead and buried before his people hear of it.  It may be they will not hear of it until a letter written to him in the care of his regiment and his company comes back unopened, with one word in sinister red letters on it—­Gefallen!

At this hotel, yesterday, I saw a lady dressed in heavy black.  She had the saddest, bravest face I ever looked into, I think.  She sat in the restaurant with two other ladies, who were also in black.  The octogenarian censor of telegrams passed them on the way out.  To her two companions he bowed deeply, but at her side he halted and, bending very low, he kissed her hand, and then went away without a word.

The head waiter, who knows all the gossip of the house and of half the town besides, told us about her.  Her only son, a lieutenant of artillery, was killed at the taking of Liege.  It was three days before she learned of his death, though she was here in Aachen, only a few miles away; for so slowly as this does even bad news travel in war times when it pertains to the individual.

Another week elapsed before her husband, who is a lieutenant-colonel, could secure leave of absence and return from the French border to seek for his son’s body; and there was still another week of searching before they found it.  It was at the bottom of a trench, under the bodies of a score or more of his men; and it was in such a state that the mother had not been permitted to look on her dead boy’s face.

Such things as this must be common enough hereabouts, but one hears very little of them and sees even less.  Aix-la-Chapelle has suffered most heavily.  The Aix regiment was shot to pieces in the first day’s fighting at Liege.  Nearly half its members were killed or wounded; but astonishingly few women in mourning are to be seen on the street, and none of the men wear those crape arm bands that are so common in Europe ordinarily; nor, except about the railroad station, are very many wounded to be seen.