helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube—­night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and military salutes.  You are under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or barracks or museum of antiques.  At noon the guard is turned out in your honor; at four you are watching distant shell-fire from the Belgian dunes; at eleven, crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel, where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local German commandant.  Everything is done for you—­more, of course, than one would wish—­the gifted young captain-conductor speaks English one minute, French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night, past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an Ausweis, contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from a band-box, and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious feeling of never having been away at all.

It isn’t, of course, an ideal way of working—­not like putting on a hat and strolling out to war, as one sometimes could do in the early weeks in Belgium and France.  The front is a big and rather accidental place, however—­you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back something to help complete the civilian’s puzzle picture of the war.  Our moment came in the German trenches before La Bassee, when, with the English so near that you could have thrown a baseball into their trenches, both sides began to toss dynamite bombs at each other.

We had come across to Cologne on the regular night express, shifted to a military train, and so on through Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the next morning’s train down to Lille.  Armentieres was only eight miles away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way to the south Neuve Chapelle, where the English offensive had first succeeded, then been thrown back only a few days before.

Spring had come over night, the country was green, sparkling with canals and little streams, and the few Belgian peasants left were trying to put it in shape for summer.  A few were ploughing with horses, others laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with a spade; once we passed half a dozen men dragging a harrow.  Every tree in this country, where wood is grown like any other crop, was speckled with white spots where branches had been trimmed away, and below the timber was piled—­ heavy logs for lumber, smaller ones cut into firewood—­the very twigs piled as carefully as so many stacks of celery.

So fresh and neat and clean-swept did it seem .in that soft sunshine that one forgot how empty it was—­so empty and repressed that one awoke startled to see three shaggy farm horses galloping off as the train rolled by, kicking up their heels as if they never had heard of war.  It seemed frivolous, almost impertinent, and the landsturm officer, leaning in the open window beside me in the passageway, thinking