ngs, with the splendid old Gothic town hall rising on one
side of it and the famous Church of Saint Pierre at the bottom of the
gore, that we first beheld at close hand the army of the War Lord.
Alongside the Belgian Lion we had thought it best to keep our distance
from the troops as they passed obliquely across our line of vision.
Here we might press as closely as we pleased to the column. The
magnificent precision with which the whole machinery moved was
astounding--I started to say appalling. Three streets converging into
the place were glutted with men, extending from curb to curb; and for an
outlet there was but one somewhat wider street, which twisted its course
under the gray walls of the church. Yet somehow the various lines
melted together and went thumping off out of sight like streams running
down a funnel and out at the spout.

Never, so far as we could tell, was there any congestion, any hitch, any
suggestion of confusion. Frequently there would come from a sideway a
group of officers on horseback, or a whole string of commandeered
touring cars bearing monocled, haughty staff officers in the tonneaus,
with guards riding beside the chauffeurs and small slick trunks strapped
on behind. A whistle would sound shrilly then; and magically a gap
would appear in the formation. Into this gap the horsemen or the
imperious automobiles would slip, and away the column would go again
without having been disturbed or impeded noticeably. No stage manager
ever handled his supers better; and here, be it remembered, there were
uncountable thousands of supers, and for a stage the twisting, medieval
convolutions of a strange city. Now for a space of minutes it would be
infantry that passed, at the swinging lunge of German foot soldiers on a
forced march. Now it would be cavalry, with accouterments jingling and
horses scrouging in the close-packed ranks; else a battery of the
viperish looking little rapid-fire guns, or a battery of heavier cannon,
with cloth fittings over their ugly snouts, like muzzled dogs whose bark
is bad and whose bite is worse.

Then, always in due order, would succeed the field telegraph corps; the
field post-office corps; the Red Cross corps; the brass band of, say,
forty pieces; and all the rest of it, to the extent of a thousand and
one circus parades rolled together. There were boats for making pontoon
bridges, mounted side by side on wagons, with the dried mud of the River
Meuse still on t