We came to a tall barber pole which a careless painter had striped with black on white instead of with red on white, and we knew by that we had arrived at the frontier.  Also, there stood alongside the pole a royal forest ranger in green, with a queer cockaded hat on his head, doing sentry duty.  As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us, not pears, but papers.  Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few rods by soldiers begging for papers.  Some had small wooden sign-boards bearing the word Zeitung, which they would lift and swing across the path of an approaching automobile.  I began to believe after a while that if a man had enough newspapers in stock he could bribe his way through the German troops clear into France.

These fellows who gathered about us now were of the Landsturm, men in their late thirties and early forties, with long, shaggy mustaches.  Their kind forms the handle of the mighty hammer whose steel nose is battering at France.  Every third one of them wore spectacles, showing that the back lines of the army are extensively addicted to the favorite Teutonic sport of being nearsighted.  Also, their coat sleeves invariably were too long for them, and hid their big hands almost to the knuckles.  This is a characteristic I have everywhere noted among the German privates.  If the French soldier’s coat is over-lengthy in the skirt the German’s is ultra-generous with cloth in the sleeves.  I saw that their hair was beginning to get shaggy, showing that they had been in the field some weeks, since every German soldier—­officer and private alike—­leaves the barracks so close-cropped that his skin shows pinky through the bristles.  Among them was one chap in blue sailor’s garb, left behind doubtless when forty-five hundred naval reserves passed through three days before to work the big guns in front of Antwerp.

We went on.  At first there was nothing to show we had entered Belgium except that the Prussian flag did not hang from a pole in front of every farmhouse, but only in front of every fourth house, say, or every fifth one.  Then came stretches of drenched fields, vacant except for big black ravens and nimble piebald magpies, which bickered among themselves in the neglected and matted grain; and then we swung round a curve in the rutted roadway and were in the town of Battice.

No; we were not in the town of Battice.  We were where the town of Battice had been—­where it stood six weeks ago.  It was famous then for its fat, rich cheeses and its green damson plums.  Now, and no doubt for years to come, it will be chiefly notable as having been the town where, it is said, Belgian civilians first fired on the German troops from roofs and windows, and where the Germans first inaugurated their ruthless system of reprisal on houses and people alike.