is
ability ever of understanding mine. To him, now, old John Burns of
Gettysburg, going out in his high, high hat and his long, long coat to
fight with the boys would never, could never be the heroic figure which
he is in the American imagination; he would have been a meddlesome
malefactor deserving of immediate death. For 1778 write it 1914, and
Molly Pitcher serving at the guns would have been in no better case
before a German court-martial. I doubt whether a Prussian Stonewall
Jackson would give orders to kill a French Barbara Frietchie, but
assuredly he would lock that venturesome old person up in a fortress
where she could not hoist her country's flag nor invite anybody to shoot
her gray head. For you must know that the German who ordinarily brims
over with that emotion which, lacking a better name for it, we call
sentiment, drains all the sentiment out of his soul when he takes his
gun in his hand and goes to war.

Among the frowzy turnip tops two big dull gray automobiles were
stranded, like large hulks in a small green sea. Alongside them a
devil's darning-needle of a wireless mast stuck up, one hundred and odd
feet, toward the sky. It was stayed with many steel guy ropes, like the
center pole of a circus top. It was of the collapsible model and might
therefore be telescoped into itself and taken down in twenty minutes, so
we were informed pride-fully by the captain in charge; and from its
needle-pointed tip the messages caught out of the ether came down by
wire conductors to the interior of one of the stalled automobiles and
there were noted down and, whenever possible, translated by two soldier-
operators, who perched on wooden stools among batteries and things, for
which I know not the technical names. The spitty snarl of the apparatus
filled the air for rods roundabout. It made you think of a million
gritty slate pencils squeaking over a million slates all together. We
were permitted to take up the receivers and listen to a faint scratching
sound which must have come from a long way off.

Indeed the officer told us that it was a message from the enemy that we
heard.

"Our men just picked it up," he explained; "we think it must come from a
French wireless station across the river. Naturally we cannot
understand it, any more than they can understand our messages--they're
all in code, you know. Every day or two we change our code, and I
presume they do too."

Two of our party had unshipped thei