ld
have worn it to a faded blue-and-red wisp of worsted. The German
helmets stood the exposure better. They retained their shape.

On a cross I saw one helmet with a bullet hole right through the center
of it in front. Sometimes there would be flowers on the mound, faded
garlands of field poppies and wreaths of withered wild vines; and by the
presence of these we could tell that the dead man's mates had time and
opportunity to accord him greater honor than usually is be-stowed on a
soldier killed in an advance or during a retreat.

Mons was reached soon, looking much as I imagine Mons must always have
looked; and then, after a few stretching and weary leagues, Brussels--to
my mind the prettiest and smartest of the capital cities of Europe, not
excluding Paris. I first saw Brussels when it was as gay as carnival--
that was in mid-August; and, though Liege had fallen and Namur was
falling, and the German legions were eating up the miles as they hurried
forward through the dust and smoke of their own making, Brussels still
floated her flags, built her toy barricades, and wore a gay face to mask
the panic clutching at her nerves.

Getting back four days later I found her beginning to rally from the
shock of the invasion. Her people, relieved to find that the enemy did
not mean to mistreat noncombatants who obeyed his code of laws, were
going about their affairs in such odd hours as they could spare from
watching the unending gray freshet that roared and pounded through their
streets. The flags were down and the counterfeit light-heartedness was
gone; but essentially she was the same Brussels.

Coming now, however, six weeks later, I found a city that had been
transformed out of her own customary image by captivity and hunger and
hard-curbed resentment. The pulse of her life seemed hardly to beat at
all. She lay in a coma, flashing up feverishly sometimes at false
rumors of German repulses to the southward.

Only the day before we arrived a wild story got abroad among the
starvelings in the poorer quarters that the Russians had taken Berlin
and had swept across Prussia and were now pushing forward, with an
irresistible army, to relieve Brussels. So thousands of the deluded
populace went to a bridge on the eastern outskirts of the town to catch
the first glimpse of the victorious oncoming Russians; and there they
stayed until nightfall, watching and hoping and--what was more pitiable
--believing.

From what I sa