ot in the least as a general and aides would behave in a story
book or on the stage, and when they were through they came back for
their coffee and their cigars to the table where the rest of us sat.

"We are going now to a battery of the twenty-one-centimeter guns and
from there to the ten-centimeters," called out Lieutenant Geibel as we
climbed aboard our cars; "and when we pass that first group of houses
yonder we shall be under fire. So if you have wills to make, you
American gentlemen, you should be making them now before we start." A
gay young officer was Lieutenant Geibel, and he just naturally would
have his little joke whether or no.

Immediately then and twice again that day we were technically presumed
to be under fire--I use the word technically advisedly--and again the
next day and once again two days thereafter before Antwerp, but I was
never able to convince myself that it was so. Certainly there was no
sense of actual danger as we sped through the empty single street of a
despoiled and tenantless village. All about us were the marks of what
the shellfire had done, some fresh and still smoking, some old and dry-
charred, but no shells dropped near us as we circled in a long swing up
to within half a mile of the first line of German trenches and perhaps a
mile to the left of them.

Thereby we arrived safely and very speedily and without mishap at a
battery of twenty-one-centimeter guns, standing in a gnawed sheep
pasture behind an abandoned farmhouse, what was left of a farmhouse,
which was to say very little of it indeed. The guns stood in a row, and
each one of them--there were five in all--stared with its single round
eye at the blue sky where the sky showed above a thick screen of tall
slim poplars growing on the far side of the farmyard. We barely had
time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in
the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to
lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from
the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the
sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were
tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them
from bogging down in miry places--I say we barely had time to note these
details mentally when things began to happen. There was a large and much
be-mired soldier who spraddled face downward upon his belly in one of
the straw-line