ers
tossed them chocolate and sausage and slices of buttered Kriegsbrod,
which they took without thanks, still repeating in a curious jumble of
German and French, "Pfennig venir! Pfennig--Pfennig--Pfennig venir!"'

Two officers from division headquarters were waiting for us in the
station at Lille--one, a tall, easy-going young fellow in black
motor-gauntlets, who looked as if he might, a few years before, have
rowed on some American college crew; the other, in the officers'
gray-blue frock overcoat with fur collar, a softer type, with quick,
dark eyes and smile, and the pleasant, slightly languid manners of a
young legation secretary.

We had just time to glance at the broken windows in the station roof,
the two or three smashed blocks around it, and be hurried to that most
empty of places--a modern city hotel without any guests--when three gray
military motor-cars, with the imperial double eagle in black on their
sides, whirled up. The officers took the lead, our happy family
distributed itself in the others, and with cut-outs drumming, a soldier
beside each chauffeur blowing a warning, and an occasional gay "Ta-ta
ta-ta!" on a silver horn, we whirled out into the open country.

We passed a church with a roof smashed by an aeroplane a few days
before--and caught at the same time the first "B-r-r-rurm!" from the
cannonading to the west--a supply-train, an overturned motor-van, and
here and there packed ammunition wagons and guns. Presently, in the lee
of a little brick farmhouse a short distance from the village of Aubers,
we alighted, and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too close
together, walked a little farther down the road. Not a man was in
sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even a trench, yet we were, as a matter
of fact, in the middle of a battle-field. From where we stood it was
not more than a mile to the English trenches and only two miles to Neuve
Chapelle; and even as we stood there, from behind us, from a battery we
had passed without seeing, came a crash and then the long spinning roar
of something milling down aisles of air, and a far-off detonation from
the direction of Neuve Chapelle.

Tssee-ee-rr... Bong! over our heads from the British lines came an
answering wail, and in the field, a quarter of a mile beyond us, there
was a geyser of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow cloud
of smoke. From all over the horizon came the wail and crash of shells--
an "artillery duel,