r canvas tops, then gigantic siege-guns, their grim
muzzles pointing skyward, each drawn by thirty straining horses;
engineers, sappers and miners with picks and spades, pontoon-wagons,
carts piled high with what looked like masses of yellow silk but which
proved to be balloons, bicyclists with carbines slung upon their backs
hunter-fashion, aeroplane outfits, bearded and spectacled doctors of
the medical corps, armoured motor-cars with curved steel rails above
them as a protection against the wires which the Belgians were in the
habit of stringing across the roads, battery after battery of pom-poms
(as the quick-firers are descriptively called), and after them more
batteries of spidery-looking, lean-barrelled machine-guns, more
Uhlans--the sunlight gleaming on their lance-tips and the breeze
fluttering their pennons into a black-and-white cloud above them, and
then infantry in spiked and linen-covered helmets, more infantry and
still more infantry--all sweeping by, irresistibly as a mighty river,
with their faces turned towards France.

This was the Ninth Field Army, composed of the very flower of the
German Empire, including the magnificent troops of the Imperial
Guard. It was first and last a fighting army. The men were all young,
and they struck me as being as keen as razors and as hard as
nails. Their equipment was the acme to all appearances ordinary
two-wheeled farm-carts, contained "nests" of nine machine-guns
which could instantly be brought into action. The medical corps was
magnificent; as businesslike, as completely equipped, and as
efficient as a great city hospital--as, indeed, it should be, for no
hospital ever built was called upon to treat so many emergency
cases. One section of the medical corps consisted wholly of
pedicurists, who examined and treated the feet of the men. If a
German soldier has even a suspicion of a corn or a bunion or a
chafed heel and does not instantly report to the regimental
pedicurist for treatment he is subject to severe punishment. He is
not permitted to neglect his feet--or for that matter his teeth, or any
other portion of his body--because his feet do not belong to him but
to the Kaiser, and the Kaiser expects those feet kept in condition to
perform long and arduous marches and to fight his battles.

At one cross-roads I saw a soldier with a horse-clipping machine.
An officer stood beside him and closely scanned the heads of the
passing men. Whenever he spied a soldier w