aw where the soldiers
had slept, and the straw was thickly covered with dried mud and already
gave off a sour-sickish odor. Over everything was the lime dust from
the powdered walls and plastering.

We drove away, then, over the hill toward the south. From the crest of
the bluff we could look down on ruined La Buissiere, with its garrison
of victorious invaders, its frightened townspeople, and its houses full
of maimed and crippled soldiers of both sides.

Beyond we could see the fields, where the crops, already overripe, must
surely waste for lack of men and teams to harvest them; and on the edge
of one field we marked where the three peasants dug the grave for the
rotting horse, striving to get it underground before it set up a plague.

Except for them, busy with pick and spade, no living creature in sight
was at work.

Sherman said it!

Chapter 4

"Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter!"

Have you ever seen three hundred thousand men and one hundred thousand
horses moving in one compact, marvelous unit of organization, discipline
and system? If you have not seen it you cannot imagine what it is like.
If you have seen it you cannot tell what it is like. In one case the
conceptive faculty fails you; in the other the descriptive. I, who have
seen this sight, am not foolish enough to undertake to put it down with
pencil on paper. I think I know something of the limitations of the
written English language. What I do mean to try to do in this chapter is
to record some of my impressions as I watched it.

In beginning this job I find myself casting about for comparisons to set
up against the vision of a full German army of seven army corps on the
march. I think of the tales I have read and the stories I have heard of
other great armies: Alaric's war bands and Attila's; the First Crusade;
Hannibal's cohorts, and Alexander's host, and Caesar's legions; the
Goths and the Vandals; the million of Xerxes--if it was a million--and
Napoleon starting for Moscow.

It is of no use. This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across
Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made,
man-managed thing. It seems more like a great, orderly function of
Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a
mighty wind. It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of
thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly is it welded into a whole. It
is harder still to accep