n very hard. The rain, as it splashed into the puddles, stippled
the farther reaches of the road thickly with dots, and its slanting
lines turned everything into one gray etching which you might have
labeled Desolation! And you would make no mistake in your labeling.
Then--with one of those tricks of deliberate drama by which Nature
sometimes shames stage managers--the late afternoon sun came out just
after we crossed the frontier, and shone on us; and on the dapper young
officers driving out in carriages; and on the peaceful German country
places with their formal gardens; and on a crate of fat white German
pigs riding to market to be made up into sausages for the placid
burghers of Aix-la-Chapelle.

Chapter 8

Three Generals and a Cook

To get to the civic midriff of the ancient and honorable French city of
Laon you must ascend a road that winds in spirals about a high, steep
hill, like threads cut in a screw. Doing this you come at length to the
flat top of the screw--a most curiously flat top--and find on this side
of you the Cathedral and the market-place, and on that side of you the
Hotel de Ville, where a German flag hangs among the iron lilies in the
grille-worked arms of the Republic above the front doors. Dead ahead of
you is the Prefecture, which is a noble stone building, facing southward
toward the River Aisne; and it has decorations of the twentieth century,
a gateway of the thirteenth century and plumbing of the third century,
when there was no plumbing to speak of.

We had made this journey and now the hour was seven in the evening, and
we were dining in the big hall of the Prefecture as the guests of His
Excellency, Field Marshal von Heeringen, commanding the Seventh Army of
the German Kaiser--dining, I might add, from fine French plates, with
smart German orderlies for waiters.

Except us five, and one other, the twenty-odd who sat about the great
oblong table were members of the Over-General's staff. We five were
Robert J. Thompson, American consul at Aix-la-Chapelle; McCutcheon and
Bennett, of the Chicago Tribune; Captain Alfred Mannesmann, of the
great German manufacturing firm of Mannesmann Mulag; and myself. The
one other was a Berlin artist, by name Follbehr, who having the run of
the army, was going out daily to do quick studies in water colors in the
trenches and among the batteries. He did them remarkably well, too,
seeing that any minute a shell might come and spatter him a