ns are to be inoculated. They are very
much excited about it. It appears to them worse than a bombardment."

We passed a file of Spahis, native Algerians who speak Arabic. They
come from Tunis and Algeria, and, as may be imagined, they were
suffering bitterly from the cold.

They peered at us with bright, black eyes from the encircling folds of
the great cloaks with pointed hoods which they had drawn closely about
them. They have French officers and interpreters, and during the
spring fighting they probably proved very valuable. During the winter
they gave me the impression of being out of place and rather forlorn.
Like the Indian troops with the British, they were fighting a new
warfare. For gallant charges over dry desert sands had been
substituted mud and mist and bitter cold, and the stagnation of
armies.

Terrible tales have been told of the ferocity of these Arabs, and of
the Turcos also. I am inclined to think they are exaggerated. But
certainly, met with on a lonely road, these long files of men in their
quaint costumes moving silently along with heads lowered against the
wind were sombre, impressive and rather alarming.

The car, going furiously, skidded, was pulled sharply round and
righted itself. The conversation went on. No one appeared to notice
that we had been on the edge of eternity, and it was not for me to
mention it. But I made a jerky entry in my notebook:

"Very casual here about human life. Enlarge on this."

The general, who was a Belgian, continued his complaint. It was about
the Belgian absentee tax.

The Germans now in control in Belgium had imposed an absentee tax of
ten times the normal on all Belgians who had left the country and did
not return by the fifteenth of March. The general snorted his rage and
disgust.

"But," I said innocently, "I should think it would make very little
difference to you. You are not there, so of course you cannot pay it."

"Not there!" he said. "Of course I am not there. But everything I own
in the world is there, except this uniform that I have on my back."

"They would confiscate it?" I asked. "Not the uniform, of course; I
mean your property."

He broke into a torrent of rapid French. I felt quite sure that he was
saying that they would confiscate it; that they would annihilate it,
reduce it to its atomic constituents; take it, acres and buildings and
shade trees and vegetable garden, back to Germany. But as his French
was of the ninety horse-pow