t it as a mutable and a mortal organism, subject
to the shifts of chance and mischance.

And then, on top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of
three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one
single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war
strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater
army and hardly know it was there--why, then, the brain refuses to
wrestle with a computation so gigantic. The imagination just naturally
bogs down and quits.

I have already set forth in some detail how it came to pass that we went
forth from Brussels in a taxicab looking for the war; and how in the
outskirts of Louvain we found it, and very shortly thereafter also found
that we were cut off from our return and incidentally had lost not only
our chauffeur and our taxi-cab but our overcoats as well. There being
nothing else to do we made ourselves comfortable along side the Belgian
Lion Cafe in the southern edge of Louvain, and for hours we watched the
advance guard sliding down the road through a fog of white dust.

Each time a break came in the weaving gray lines we fancied this surely
was all. All? What we saw there was a puny dribbling stream compared
with the torrent that was coming. The crest of that living tidal wave
was still two days and many miles to the rearward. We had seen the head
and a little of the neck. The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray
centipede was as yet far behind.

As we sat in chairs tilted against the wall and watched, we witnessed an
interesting little side play. At the first coming of the German
skirmishers the people of this quarter of the town had seemed stupefied
with amazement and astonishment. Most of them, it subsequently
developed, had believed right up to the last minute that the forts of
Liege still held out and that the Germans had not yet passed the
gateways of their country, many kilometers to the eastward. When the
scouts of the enemy appeared in their streets they fell for the moment
into a stunned state. A little later the appearance of a troop of
Uhlans had revived their resentment. We had heard that quick hiss and
snarl of hatred which sprang from them as the lancers trotted into view
on their superb mounts out of the mouth of a neighboring lane, and had
seen how instantaneously the dull, malignant gleam of gun metal, as a
sergeant pulled his pistol on them, had brought the silence of
fri