in the dusk, kept up a running fire, and a large number of the wounded were killed.  Had the incident been the other way about it would have been cited as a deliberate piece of villainy on the part of the Germans.  According to other accounts, the Germans always go into action with screens of women and children before them.  The explanation, of course, is that a few poor terrified creatures are rushing along the road.  They get between the approaching forces, and I expect the bullets that put them out of their misery come pretty even from both sides.

The men are mad.  Mad with fear, mad with hate, blinded by excitement.  Take a mere dog fight.  If you interfere you have got to be prepared for your own dog turning upon you.  In war half the time the men do not know what they are doing.  They are little else than wild beasts.  There was great indignation at the dropping of bombs into Antwerp.  One now hears that a French dirigible has been dropping bombs into Luxembourg—­a much more dignified retort.  War is a grim game.  Able editors and club-chair politicians have been clamoring for it for years past.  They thought it was all goose-step and bands.

The truth is bad enough, God knows.  There is no sense in making things out worse than they are.  When this war is over we have got to forget it.  To build up barriers of hatred that shall stand between our children and our foemen’s children is a crime against the future.

These stories of German naval officers firing on their wounded sailors in the water!  They are an insult to our intelligence.  At Louvain fifty of the inhabitants were taken out and shot.  On Monday the fifty had grown to five hundred; both numbers vouched for by eye-witnesses, “Dutchmen who would have had no interest,” &c.  That the beautiful old town has been laid in ashes is undoubted.  Some criminal lunatic strutting in pipeclay and mustachios was given his hour of authority and took the chance of his life.  If I know anything of the German people it will go hard with him when the war is over, if he has not had the sense to get killed.  But that won’t rear again the grand old stones or wipe from Germany’s honor the stain of that long line of murdered men and women—­whatever its actual length may have been.  War puts a premium on brutality and senselessness.  Men with the intelligence and instincts of an ape suddenly find themselves possessed of the powers of a god.  And we are astonished that they do not display the wisdom of a god!

There are other stories that have filtered through to us.  There was a dying Uhlan who caught a child to his arms and kissed him.  One would like to be able to kiss one’s own child before one dies, but failing that—­well, after all, there is a sort of family likeness between them.  The same deep wondering eyes, the same—­and then the mist grows deeper.  Perhaps after all it was Baby Fritz that he kissed.

And of a Belgian woman.  She had seen her two sons killed before her eyes.  She tells of that and of other horrors.  Among such, of the German lads she had stepped over, their blue eyes quiet in death.  The passion and the fear and the hate cleansed out of them.  Just boys with their clothes torn—­so like boys.