e war, my convictions underwent a rapid
crumbling before the rising tide of French national feeling. The
American Legion exercised a growing fascination over me. A little
longer, and I might have been marching out to the music of the
Marseillaise, dedicated to the killing of the Germans. Two weeks
later I fell under the spell of the self-same Germans. That long gray
column swinging on through Liege so mesmerized me that my
natural revulsion against slaughter was changed to actual
admiration.

Had an officer right then thrust a musket into my hand, I could
have mechanically fallen into step and fared forth to the killing of
the French. Such an experience makes one chary about dispensing
counsels of perfection to those fighting in the vortex of the world-storm.
Whenever I begin to get shocked at the black crimes of the belligerents,
my own collapse lies there to accuse me.

It is in the spirit of a non-partisan, then, that this chronicle of
adventure in those crucial days of the early war is written. It is a
welter of experiences and reactions which the future may use as
another first-hand document in casting up its own conclusions.
There is no careful culling out of just those episodes which support
a particular theory, such as the total and complete depravity of the
German race.

Despite my British ancestry, the record tries to be impartial--
without pro- or anti-German squint. If the reader had been in my
skin, zigzagging his way through five different armies, the things
which I saw are precisely the ones which he would have seen. So I
am not to blame whether these episodes damn the Germans or
bless them. Some do, and some don't. What one ran into was
largely a matter of luck.

For example: In Brussels on September 27, 1914, I fell in with a
lieutenant of the British army. With an American passport he had
made his way into the city through the German lines. We both
desired to see Louvain, but all passage thereto was for the
moment forbidden. Starting out on the main road, however, sentry
after sentry passed us along until we were halted near staff
headquarters, a few miles out of the city, and taken before the
commandant. We informed him of our overweening desire to view
the ruins of Louvain. He explained, as sarcastically as he could,
that war was not a social diversion, and bade us make a quick
return to Brussels, swerving neither to the right nor left as we went.

As we were plodding wearily back, temptation