_liaison_ can be
readily distinguished by their caps, which resemble those worn by
railroad brakemen, and by the gilt sphinx on the collars of their drab
uniforms. This emblem was chosen by Napoleon as a badge for the corps
of interpreters he organized during his Egyptian campaign, but the
British unkindly assert it was selected for the _liaison_ officers
because nobody can understand them.

The more I see of the war the more I am impressed with its utter
impersonality. It is a highly organized business, conducted by
specialists, and into it personalities and picturesqueness seldom
enter. One hears the noise and the clamor, of course; one sees the
virility, the intense activity, the feverish haste, yet at the same
time one realizes how little the human element counts; all is
machinery and mathematics. I remember that one day I was lunching in
his dugout with an officer commanding a battery of heavy howitzers.
Just as my host was serving the tinned peaches the telephone-bell
jangled. It was an observation officer, up near the firing-line,
reporting that through his telescope he had spotted a German
ammunition column passing through a certain ruined hamlet three or
four miles away. On his map the battery commander showed me a small
square, probably not more than three or four acres in extent, on
which, in order to "get" that ammunition column, his shells must fall.
Some rapid calculations on a pad of paper, and, calling in his
subordinate, he handed him the "arithmetic." A minute or two later,
from a clump of trees close by, there came in rapid succession four
splitting crashes and four invisible express-trains went screeching
toward the German lines to explode, with the roar that scatters death,
on a spot as far away and as invisible from me as Washington Square is
from Grant's Tomb. Before the echo of the guns had died away my host
was back to his tinned peaches again. Neither he, nor any of his
gunners, knew, or ever would know, or, indeed, very greatly cared,
what destruction those shells had wrought. That's what I mean by the
impersonality of modern war.

* * * * *

Our car stopped with startling abruptness in response to the upraised
hand of a giant in khaki whose high-crowned sombrero and the brass
letters on his shoulder-straps showed that he was a trooper of the
Alberta Horse. On his arm was a red brassard bearing the magic letters
M. P.--Military Police.

"Better not go any