to the soldiers, stamp-free, from any part of the German Empire. I
wonder how men managed to wage war in the days before the automobile.

Two waiting cars received our party and our guides and our drivers, and
we went corkscrewing down the hill, traversing crooked ways that were
astonishingly full of German soldiers and astonishingly free of French
townspeople. Either the citizens kept to their closed-up houses or,
having run away at the coming of the enemy, they had not yet dared to
return, although so far as I might tell there was no danger of their
being mistreated by the gray-backs. Reaching the plain which is below
the city we streaked westward, our destination being the field wireless
station.

Nothing happened on the way except that we overtook a file of slightly
wounded prisoners who, having been treated at the front, were now bound
for a prison in a convent yard, where they would stay until a train
carried them off to Munster or Dusseldorf for confinement until the
end of the war. I counted them.--two English Tommies, two French
officers, one lone Belgian--how he got that far down into France nobody
could guess--and twenty-eight French cannoneers and infantrymen,
including some North Africans. Every man Jack of them was bandaged
either about the head or about the arms, or else he favored an injured
leg as he hobbled slowly on. Eight guards were nursing them along;
their bayonets were socketed in their carbine barrels. No doubt the
magazines of the carbines were packed with those neat brass capsules
which carry doses of potential death; but the guards, except for the
moral effect of the thing, might just as well have been bare-handed.
None of the prisoners could have run away even had he been so minded.
The poor devils were almost past walking, let alone running. They
wouldn't even look up as we went by them.

The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his
belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger
who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher
dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is
gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas. Modern military science has
wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of
the old game of war. Bands no longer play the forces into the fight--
indeed I have seen no more bands afield with the dun-colored files of
the Germans than I might count on the fing