or strolling decorously under the trees that shaded every road.
Even the Red Cross flags hanging from the windows of many of the larger
houses seemed for once in keeping with the peaceful picture. Of Germans
during the afternoon we saw almost none. Thick enough in the center of
the town, the gray backs showed themselves hardly at all in the
environs.

At the city line a small guard lounged on benches before a wine shop.
They stood up as we drew near, but changed their minds and squatted down
without challenging us to produce the safe-conduct papers that Herr
General Major Thaddeus von Jarotzky, sitting in due state in the ancient
Hotel de Ville, had bestowed on us an hour before.

Just before we reached Waterloo we saw in a field on the right, near the
road, a small camp of German cavalry. The big, round-topped yellow
tents, sheltering twenty men each and looking like huge tortoises, stood
in a line. From the cook-wagons, modeled on the design of those carried
by an American circus, came the heavy, meaty smells of stews boiling in
enormous caldrons. The men were lying or sitting on straw piles,
singing German marching songs as they waited for their supper. It was
always so--whenever and wherever we found German troops at rest they
were singing, eating or drinking--or doing all three at once. A German
said to me afterwards:

"Why do we win? Three things are winning for us--good marching, good
shooting and good cooking; but most of all the cooking. When our troops
stop there is always plenty of hot food for them. We never have to
fight on an empty stomach--we Germans."

These husky singers were the last Germans we were to see for many hours;
for between the garrison force left behind in Brussels and the fast-
moving columns hurrying to meet the English and the French and a few
Belgians--on the morrow--a matter of many leagues now intervened.

Evidence of the passing through of the troops was plentiful enough
though. We saw it in the trampled hedges; in the empty beer bottles
that dotted the roadside ditches--empty bottles, as we had come to know,
meant Germans on ahead; in the subdued, furtive attitude of the country
folk, and, most of all, in the chalked legend, in stubby German script--
"Gute Leute!"--on nearly every wine-shop shutter or cottage door.
Soldiers quartered in such a house overnight had on leaving written this
line--"Good people!"--to indicate the peaceful character of the
dwellers therein a