I have quoted my conversation with General von Boehn as nearly verbatim as I can remember it.  I have no comments to make.  I will leave it to my readers to decide for themselves just how convincing were the answers of the German General Staff—­for General von Boehn was but its mouthpiece—­to the Belgian accusations.  Before we began our conversation I asked the general if my photographer, Thompson, might be permitted to take photographs of the great army which was passing.  Five minutes later Thompson whirled away in a military motor-car, ciceroned by the officer who had attended the army school at Fort Riley.  It seems that they stopped the car beside the road, in a place where the light was good, and when Thompson saw approaching a regiment or a battery or a squadron of which he wished a picture he would tell the officer, whereupon the officer would blow a whistle and the whole column would halt.

“Just wait a few minutes until the dust settles,” Thompson would remark, lighting a cigar, and the Ninth Imperial Army, whose columns stretched over the country-side as far as the eye could see, would stand in its tracks until the air was sufficiently clear to get a good picture.

A field battery of the Imperial Guard rumbled past and Thompson made some remark about the accuracy of the American gunners at Vera Cruz.

“Let us show you what our gunners can do,” said the officer, and he gave an order.  There were more orders—­a perfect volley of them.  A bugle shrilled, eight horses strained against their collars, the drivers cracked their whips, the cannoneers put their shoulders to the wheels, and a gun left the road and swung into position in an adjacent field.  On a knoll three miles away an ancient windmill was beating the air with its huge wings.  A shell hit the windmill and tore it into splinters.

“Good work,” Thompson observed critically.  “If those fellows of yours keep on they’ll be able to get a job in the American navy when the war is over.”

In all the annals of modern war I do not believe that there is a parallel to this little Kansas photographer halting, with peremptory hand, an advancing army and leisurely photographing it, regiment by regiment, and then having a field-gun of the Imperial Guard go into action solely to gratify his curiosity.

They were very courteous and hospitable to me, those German officers, and I was immensely interested with all that I saw.  But, when all is said and done, they impressed me not as human beings, who have weaknesses and virtues, likes and dislikes of their own, but rather as parts, more or less important, of a mighty and highly efficient machine which is directed and controlled by a cold and calculating intelligence in far-away Berlin.  That machine has about as much of the human element as a meat-chopper, as a steam-roller, as the death-chair at Sing Sing.  Its mission is to crush, obliterate, destroy, and no considerations of civilization or chivalry or humanity will affect it.  I think that the Germans, with their grim, set faces, their monotonous uniforms, and the ceaseless shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of their boots must have gotten on my nerves, for it was with a distinct feeling of relief that I turned the bonnet of my car once more towards Antwerp and my friends the Belgians.