There are any number of wounded privates in the local hospitals; but there must be a rule against their appearance in public places, for it is only occasionally that I meet one abroad.  Slightly wounded officers are more plentiful.  I judge from this that no such restriction applies to them as applies to the common soldiers.  This hotel is full of them—­ young officers mostly, with their heads tied up or their arms in black silk slings, or limping about on canes or crutches.

Until a few days ago the columns of the back pages of the Aix and Cologne papers were black-edged with cards inserted by relatives in memory of officers who had fallen—­“For King and Fatherland!” the cards always said.  I counted thirteen of these death notices in one issue of a Cologne paper.  Now they have almost disappeared.  I imagine that, because of the depressing effect of such a mass of these publications on the public mind, the families of killed officers have been asked to refrain from reciting their losses in print.  Yet there are not wanting signs that the grim total piles up by the hour and the day.

Late this afternoon, when I walk around to the American consulate, I shall pass the office of the chief local paper; and there I am sure to find anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred men and women waiting for the appearance on a bulletin board of the latest list of dead, wounded and missing men who are credited to Aix-la-Chapelle and its vicinity.  A new list goes up each afternoon, replacing the list of the day before.  Sometimes it contains but a few names; sometimes a good many.  Then there will be piteous scenes for a little while; but presently the mourners will go away, struggling to compose themselves as they go; for their Kaiser has asked them to make no show of their loss among their neighbors.  Having made the supremest sacrifice they can make, short of offering up their own lives, they now make another and hide their grief away from sight.  Surely, this war spares none at all—­neither those who fight nor those who stay behind.

Toward dusk the streets will fill up with promenaders.  Perhaps a regiment or so of troops, temporarily quartered here on the way to the front, will clank by, bound for their barracks in divers big music halls.  The squares may be quite crowded with uniforms; or there may be only one gray coat in proportion to three or four black ones—­this last is the commoner ratio.  It all depends on the movements of the forces.

To-night the cafes will be open and the moving-picture places will run full blast; and the free concert will go on and there will be services in the cathedral of Charlemagne.  The cafes that had English names when the war began have German ones now.  Thus the Bristol has become the Crown Prince Cafe, and the Piccadilly is the Germania; but otherwise they are just as they were before the war started, and the business in them is quite as good, the residents say, as it ever was.  Prices are no higher than they used to be—­at least I have not found them high.