perhaps of his own home across the Rhine, laughed and breathed a deep-chested “Kolossal!” We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that curious look of a run-down clock.  On the outskirts of one town, half a dozen little children stopped spinning tops in the road to demand tribute from the train.  They were pinched little children, with the worried, prematurely old faces of factory children, and they begged insistently, almost irritably, as if payment was long overdue.  Good-natured soldiers tossed them chocolate and sausage and slices of buttered Kriegsbrod, which they took without thanks, still repeating in a curious jumble of German and French, “Pfennig venir!  Pfennig—­Pfennig—­Pfennig venir!"’

Two officers from division headquarters were waiting for us in the station at Lille—­one, a tall, easy-going young fellow in black motor-gauntlets, who looked as if he might, a few years before, have rowed on some American college crew; the other, in the officers’ gray-blue frock overcoat with fur collar, a softer type, with quick, dark eyes and smile, and the pleasant, slightly languid manners of a young legation secretary.

We had just time to glance at the broken windows in the station roof, the two or three smashed blocks around it, and be hurried to that most empty of places—­a modern city hotel without any guests—­when three gray military motor-cars, with the imperial double eagle in black on their sides, whirled up.  The officers took the lead, our happy family distributed itself in the others, and with cut-outs drumming, a soldier beside each chauffeur blowing a warning, and an occasional gay “Ta-ta ta-ta!” on a silver horn, we whirled out into the open country.

We passed a church with a roof smashed by an aeroplane a few days before—­and caught at the same time the first “B-r-r-rurm!” from the cannonading to the west—­a supply-train, an overturned motor-van, and here and there packed ammunition wagons and guns.  Presently, in the lee of a little brick farmhouse a short distance from the village of Aubers, we alighted, and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too close together, walked a little farther down the road.  Not a man was in sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even a trench, yet we were, as a matter of fact, in the middle of a battle-field.  From where we stood it was not more than a mile to the English trenches and only two miles to Neuve Chapelle; and even as we stood there, from behind us, from a battery we had passed without seeing, came a crash and then the long spinning roar of something milling down aisles of air, and a far-off detonation from the direction of Neuve Chapelle.

Tssee-ee-rr...  Bong! over our heads from the British lines came an answering wail, and in the field, a quarter of a mile beyond us, there was a geyser of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow cloud of smoke.  From all over the horizon came the wail and crash of shells—­ an “artillery duel,” as the official reports call it, the sort of thing that goes on day after day.