One of the conquerors, the sentry representing the majesty of German authority in Belgium, examined the pass.  The conqueror was a good deal larger around the middle than when he was young, but not so large as when he went to war.  He had a scarf tied over his ears under a cracked old patent-leather helmet, which the Saxon Landsturm must have taken from their garrets when the Kaiser sent the old fellows to keep the Belgians in order so that the young men could be spared to get rheumatism in the trenches if they escaped death.

You could see that the conqueror missed his wife’s cooking and Sunday afternoon in the beer garden with his family.  However much he loved the Kaiser, it did not make him love home any the less.  His nod admitted us into German-ruled Belgium.  He looked so lonely that as our car started I sent him a smile.  Surprise broke on his face.  Somebody not a German in uniform had actually smiled at him in Belgium!

My last glimpse of him was of a grin spreading under the scarf toward his ears.

Belgium was webbed with these old Landsturm guards.  If your Passierschein was not right, you might survive the first set of sentries and even the second, but the third, and if not the third some succeeding one of the dozens on the way to Brussels, would hale you before a Kommandatur.  Then you were in trouble.  In travelling about Europe I became so used to passes that when I returned to New York I could not have thought of going to Hoboken without the German consul’s visa or of dining at a French restaurant without the French consul’s.

“And again!” said Harvard, 1914, as we came to another sentry.  There was good reason why Harvard had his pass in a leather-bound case under a celluloid face.  Otherwise, it would soon have been worn out in showing.  He had been warned by the Commission not to talk and he did not talk.  He was neutrality personified.  All he did was to show his pass.  He could be silent in three languages.  The only time I got anything like partisanship out of him and two sentences in succession was when I mentioned the Harvard-Yale football game.  “My!  Wasn’t that a smear!  In their new stadium, too!  Oh, my!  Wish I had been there!”

When the car broke a spring half-way to Antwerp, he remarked, “Naturally!” or, rather, a more expressive monosyllable which did not sound neutral.

While he and the Belgian chauffeur, with the help of a Belgian farmer as spectator, were patching up the broken spring, I had a look at the farm.  The winter crops were in; the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in the garden were untouched.  It happened that the scorching finger of war’s destruction had not been laid on this little property.  In the yard the wife was doing the week’s washing, her hands in hot water and her arms exposed to weather so cold that I felt none too warm in a heavy overcoat.  At first sight she gave me a frown, which instantly dissipated into a smile when she saw that I was not German.