tined to have the wish gratified in
abundance. Fifteen minutes brought me to the outskirts of Vise,
and there, coming over the hills and wending their way down to the
river, were two long lines of German soldiers escorting wagons of
the artillery and the commissariat. They came slowly and
noiselessly trudging on and I was upon them as they crossed the
main road before I realized it. The men were covered with dust; so
were the horses. The wagons were in their somber paint of gray.
There was something ominous and threatening in the long sullen
line which wound down over the hill. The soldiers were evidently
tired with the tedious uneventful march, and the drivers were
goaded to irritability by the difficulty of the descent. Could I have
retreated I would have done so with joy and would never have
stopped until my feet were set on Holland soil.

But I dared not do it. As the train came to a stop, I started bravely
across the road. A soldier, dropping his gun from his shoulder,
cried:

"Halt!"

"Is this the way to Vise?" I asked.

"Perhaps it is," he replied, "but what do you want in Vise?"

As he spoke, he kept edging up, pointing his bayonet directly at
me. A bayonet will never look quite the same to me again. Total
retreat, as I remarked, was out of the question. My inward
anatomy, however, did the next best thing. As the bayonet point
came pressing forward, my stomach retired backward. I could feel
it distinctly making efforts to crawl behind my spine. At my first
word of German his face relaxed. Ditto my stomach.

"You are an American," he said. "Well, good for that. I don't know
what we would have done were you a Belgian. Our orders are to
suffer no Belgian in this whole district."

Then he began an apologia which I heard repeated identically
again and again, as if it were learned by rote: "The Germans had
peacefully entered the land; boiling hot water was showered on
them from upper stories; they were shot at from houses and
hedges; many soldiers had thus been killed; the wells had been
poisoned. Such acts of treachery had necessarily brought
reprisals, etc., etc." It was the defense so regularly served up to
neutrals that we learned in time to reproduce it almost word for
word ourselves.

We all rise to the glorification of suffering little Belgium. Whatever
brief we may hold for her though, we ought not to picture even her
peasant people as a mild, meek and inoffensive lot. That isn't the
sort of stuff