en after a good but a hurried and fly-ridden breakfast--"I think,"
he said in his excellent Saxonized English, "that it would be as well to
look at our telephone exchange first of all. It perhaps might prove of
some small interest to you." With that he led the way through a jumble
of corridors to a far corner of the Prefecture of Laon, perching high on
the Hill of Laon and forming for the moment the keystone of the arch of
the German center. So that was how the most crowded day in a reasonably
well-crowded newspaperman's life began for me--with a visit to a room
which had in other days been somebody's reception parlor. We came upon
twelve soldier-operators sitting before portable switchboards with metal
transmitters clamped upon their heads, giving and taking messages to and
from all the corners and crannies of the mid-battle-front. This little
room was the solar plexus of the army. To it all the tingling nerves of
the mighty organism ran and in it all the ganglia centered. At two
sides of the room the walls were laced with silk-covered wires appliqued
as thickly and as closely and as intricately as the threads in old point
lace, and over these wires the gray-coated operators could talk--and did
talk pretty constantly--with all the trenches and all the batteries and
all the supply camps and with the generals of brigades and of divisions
and of corps.

One wire ran upstairs to the Over-General's sleeping quarters and ended,
so we were told, in a receiver that hung upon the headboard of his bed.
Another stretched, by relay points, to Berlin, and still another ran to
the headquarters of the General Staff where the Kaiser was, somewhere
down the right wing; and so on and so forth. If war is a business these
times instead of a chivalric calling, then surely this was the main
office and clearing house of the business.

To our novice eyes the wires seemed snarled--snarled inextricably,
hopelessly, eternally--and we said as much, but the ordnance colonel
said behind this apparent disorder a most careful and particular
orderliness was hidden away. Given an hour's notice, these busy men who
wore those steel vises clamped upon their ears could disconnect the
lines, pull down and reel in the wires, pack the batteries and the
exchanges, and have the entire outfit loaded upon automobiles for speedy
transmission elsewhere. Having seen what I had seen of the German
military system, I could not find it in my heart to doubt this