After you have seen this service uniform under conditions entirely opposite you are convinced that for the German soldier it is one of his strongest weapons.  Even the most expert marksman cannot hit a target he cannot see.  It is not the blue-gray of our Confederates, but a green-gray.  It is the gray of the hour just before daybreak, the gray of unpolished steel, of mist among green trees.

I saw it first in the Grand Place in front of the Hotel de Ville.  It was impossible to tell if in that noble square there was a regiment or a brigade.  You saw only a fog that melted into the stones, blended with the ancient house fronts, that shifted and drifted, but left you nothing at which to point.

Later, as the army passed under the trees of the Botanical Park, it merged and was lost against the green leaves.  It is no exaggeration to say that at a few hundred yards you can see the horses on which the Uhlans ride but cannot see the men who ride them.

If I appear to overemphasize this disguising uniform it is because, of all the details of the German outfit, it appealed to me as one of the most remarkable.  When I was near Namur with the rear-guard of the French Dragoons and Cuirassiers, and they threw out pickets, we could distinguish them against the yellow wheat or green corse at half a mile, while these men passing in the street, when they have reached the next crossing, become merged into the gray of the paving-stones and the earth swallowed them.  In comparison the yellow khaki of our own American army is about as invisible as the flag of Spain.

Major-General von Jarotsky, the German military governor of Brussels, had assured Burgomaster Max that the German army would not occupy the city but would pass through it.  He told the truth.  For three days and three nights it passed.  In six campaigns I have followed other armies, but, excepting not even our own, the Japanese, or the British, I have not seen one so thoroughly equipped.  I am not speaking of the fighting qualities of any army, only of the equipment and organization.  The German army moved into Brussels as smoothly and as compactly as an Empire State express.  There were no halts, no open places, no stragglers.  For the gray automobiles and the gray motorcycles bearing messengers one side of the street always was kept clear; and so compact was the column, so rigid the vigilance of the file-closers, that at the rate of forty miles an hour a car could race the length of the column and need not for a single horse or man once swerve from its course.

All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army.  And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken.  It was like the torrent that swept down the Connemaugh Valley and destroyed Johnstown.  As a correspondent I have seen all the great armies and the military