they were so watched from behind. Moreover, the outrages committed by
the Prussians under flags of truce had made it impossible for our men
to allow any one to approach. To sit opposite a Saxon regiment for a
month and not exchange shots appeared to be not uncommon. One man told
me that they poked up a notice on their bayonets saying, "We are not
going to fight"; and another said that once when "strafing" somehow
commenced, they shouted from the opposite trenches: "Save your
bullets. You'll need them to-night when the Prussian Guard relieves
us"--which proved perfectly true. One day an elderly man crawled out
of their trench, came to our barbed wire, and called out for bread. We
threw him a loaf. He wrapped up something in his cap and threw it
over. We tossed it back with more bread, but when he went back he left
the watch behind.

After an especially brutal piece of treachery, our men were too
maddened to give quarter, and one said, "A Saxon might have had a
chance with us even then, but a Prussian would have had about as
little as a beetle at a woodpecker's prayer meeting!" The Saxons, on
the other hand, displayed the individual courage of the Anglo-Saxon
that helped to lessen our losses by enabling us to attack in open
formation. Every animal will fight when forced to do so. The cowardly
wolf will attack only in packs; and one of the main reasons for the
wholesale holocausts of mass attacks seems to have been that same lack
of real courage in the boastful and militarist element. He dare not
advance alone.

A colonel in command at the first battle of the Aisne described to me
an incident that I at least did not hear elsewhere. He said that the
Germans opposite him came on sixteen abreast, arm in arm, rifles at
the trail or held anyhow. They were singing wildly, and literally
jumping up and down, as if dancing. Fire was reserved till they came
within a few hundred yards, when machine guns started to mow them
down. Hay-pooks, or rather man-pooks, were immediately formed, and the
advancing column, instead of coming straight on, went round and round
the ever-increasing stacks. He believed that they had been filled with
too much dope or too much doctored grog of some kind.

It was my great desire before returning from France to see the
conditions at the front. I was told that members of American Units
were discouraged from visiting the trenches. Dr. Carrel had twice most
kindly invited me to Compiegne to see his new w