d; a Russian, an American, four Belgians, and a
German--all prisoners awaiting our sentences. As a last move, the
German soldier guards sandwiched themselves into the open
spaces on the floor, their long bayonets glistening in the electric
light that blazed down upon us. The peasants had characteristically
closed the windows to keep out the baneful night air. In the main
room a drop-light with shade flung its radiance on a table and lit up
the anxious faces of the few men gathered round it. It showed one
poor fellow bolt upright, unspeaking, unmoving, his fixed white
eyeballs staring into space, as though he would go stark mad.
Those eyes have forever burned themselves into my brain, a pitiful
protest against a mad, wild world at war.

Sleep was entirely out of the question with me. It wasn't the bad air
or the hard floor or the snores of my comrades, but just plain cold
fear. Now I possess an average amount of courage. Quite alone I
walked in and out of Liege when the Germans were painting the
skies red with the burning towns. My ribs were massaged all the
way by ends of revolvers, whose owners demanded me to give
forthwith my reasons for being there, they being sole arbiters of
whether my reasons were good or bad. I got so used to a bayonet
pointing into the pit of my stomach that it hardly looks natural in a
vertical position.

But this was a thrust from a different quarter. In the open a man
feels a sporting chance, at any rate, even if a bullet can beat him
on the run; but cooped up within four walls he is paralyzed by his
horrible helplessness. He feels that a military court reverses
ordinary procedure, holding that it is better for nine innocent to
suffer than for one guilty one to escape. He knows that his fate is
in the hands of a tribunal from whose arbitrary decision there is no
appeal, and that decision he knows may depend upon the whim of
the commandant, to whom a poor breakfast or a bad night's sleep
may give the wrong twist. The terrible uncertainty of it preys upon
one's mind.

I certainly prayed that the commandant was getting a better night
than mine, as I lay there staring up at the electric light with a
hundred hates and fears pounding through my brain. "I'm a
prisoner," was one thought. "Supposing the silence of the guns
means that the Germans, beaten, are being pressed back into
Brussels by the Allies. They may let us go. No, the Germans,
maddened by defeat, might order us all to be shot," was