as orderly as a bank. Officers sat at the
various instruments and took notes of the different reports as they came
in. Reports were discussed quickly but quietly, and orders sent out
promptly but without confusion. The maps were kept up to the minute by
changing the little flags to show the positions of the different troops
right at the minute. There was telephone communication with the forts,
and several times they were ordered to pour fire into a certain spot to
cover an advance or a retreat of parts of the Belgian forces, and, at
other times, to cease firing, so as to let Belgian troops cross or
occupy the exact spot they had been bombarding. It was a wonderful sight
to watch, and it was hard to realise that this was merely a highly
scientific business of killing human beings on a large scale. It was so
business-like and without animus, that to anyone not knowing the
language or conditions, it might have passed as a busy day in a war
office commissary when ordering supplies and giving orders for shipment.

Just outside the headquarters was one of the fine German kitchen wagons
with two fine Norman horses which had pulled it all the way from
Germany. It had been stationed in the grounds of a chateau not far away,
and three men of its crew were hard at work getting a meal when a little
Belgian soldier with two weeks' growth of beard waltzed into the garden,
shot one of the men dead and captured the other two. He disarmed them,
put ropes around their necks and drove the kitchen to headquarters in
triumph. He was proud as punch of his exploit, and, for that matter, so
was everybody else around the place.

In a field of turnips a couple of hundred yards away from the
headquarters were the howitzers. There were three of them in a row with
three ammunition wagons. They had been sent here only a few days ago,
and they were promptly put into action. They were planted here, slightly
inside the range of the guns from the outer forts, and were able to drop
shells six miles from where we stood, or about five miles outside the
range of the fort guns. They toss a shell about two feet long, filled
with deadly white powder, six miles in ten seconds, and when the shell
strikes anything, "it thoes rocks at yeh!" as the darkey said about our
navy guns. The battery was planted down behind a little clump of pines,
and was dropping shells into a little village where there was a
considerable force of Germans about to be attacked. The Germa