poor remnant of a disorganized army, not only stood firm, but inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy and captured four hundred prisoners.  For a few hours the Germans succeeded in crossing the Yser, threatening a general advance upon the Belgian line.  Before Nieuport their trenches were only fifty metres away from those of the Belgians, and on the night of October 22 they charged eight times with the bayonet in order to force their way through.

Each assault failed against the Belgian infantry, who stayed in their trenches in spite of the blood that eddied about their feet and the corpses that lay around them.  Living and dead made a rampart which the Germans could not break.  With an incessant rattle of mitrailleuses and rifle-fire, the Belgians mowed down the German troops as they advanced in solid ranks, so that on each of those eight times the enemy’s attack was broken and destroyed.  They fell like the leaves which were then being scattered by the autumn wind and their bodies were strewn between the trenches.  Some of them were the bodies of very young men—­poor boys of sixteen and seventeen from German high schools and universities who were the sons of noble and well-to-do families, had been accepted as volunteers by Prussian war-lords ruthless of human life in their desperate gamble with fate.  Some of these lads were brought to the hospitals in Furnes, badly wounded.  One of them carried into the convent courtyard smiled as he lay on his stretcher and spoke imperfect French very politely to Englishwomen who bent over him, piteous as girls who see a wounded bird.  He seemed glad to be let off slightly with only a wound in his foot which would make him limp for life; very glad to be out of all the horror of those trenches on the German side of the Yser.  One could hardly call this boy an “enemy.”  He was just a poor innocent caught up by a devilish power, and dropped when of no more use as an instrument of death.  The pity that stirs one in the presence of one of these broken creatures does not come to one on the field of battle, where there is no single individuality, but only a grim conflict ol unseen powers, as inhuman as thunderbolts, or as the destructive terror of the old nature gods.  The enemy, then, fills one with a hatred based on fear.  One rejoices to see a shell burst over his batteries and is glad at the thought of the death that came to him of that puff of smoke.  But I found that no such animosity stirs one in the presence of the individual enemy or among crowds of their prisoners.  One only wonders at the frightfulness of the crime which makes men kill each other without a purpose of their own, but at the dictate of powers far removed from their own knowledge and interests in life.

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