Coming out of the house to reenter our automobile I saw, across the small square of the town, which by now was quite in darkness, the flare of a camp kitchen.  I wanted very much to examine one of these wheeled cook wagons at close range.  An officer—­the same who had first approached us to examine our papers—­accompanied me to explain its workings and to point out the various compartments where the coal was kept and the fuel, and the two big sunken pots where the stew was cooked and the coffee was brewed.  The thing proved to be cumbersome, which was German, but it was most complete in detail, and that, take it, was German too.  While the officer rattled the steel lids the cook himself stood rigidly alongside, with his fingers touching the seams of his trousers.  Seen by the glare of his own fire he seemed a clod, fit only to make soups and feed a fire box.  But by that same flickery light I saw something.  On the breast of his grease-spattered blouse dangled a black-and-white ribbon with a black-and-white Maltese cross fastened to it.  I marveled that a company cook should wear the Iron Cross of the second class and I asked the captain about it.  He laughed at the wonder that was evident in my tones.

“If you will look more closely,” he said, “you will see that a good many of our cooks already have won the Iron Cross since this war began, and a good many others will yet win it—­if they live.  We have no braver men in our army than these fellows.  They go into the trenches at least twice a day, under the hottest fire sometimes, to carry hot coffee and hot food to the soldiers who fight.  A good many of them have already been killed.

“Only the other day—­at La Fere I think it was—­two of our cooks at daybreak went so far forward with their wagon that they were almost inside the enemy’s lines.  Sixteen bewildered Frenchmen who had got separated from their company came straggling through a little forest and walked right into them.  The Frenchmen thought the cook wagon with its short smoke funnel and its steel fire box was a new kind of machine gun, and they threw down their guns and surrendered.  The two cooks brought their sixteen prisoners back to our lines too, but first one of them stood guard over the Frenchmen while the other carried the breakfast coffee to the men who had been all night in the trenches.  They are good men, those cooks!”

So at last I found out at second hand what one German soldier had done to merit the bestowal of the Iron Cross.  But as we came away, I was in doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it:  I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of the German Army in this war—­the general feeding his men by thousands into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a coffee boiler in his hands—­because it was an order.

Chapter 9