had died.

In the courtyard next our post two men were carrying in long strips of
wood. This wood was for coffins, and one of them would be his.

A funeral passes our car, one every day, sometimes two: a wooden cross
in front, carried by a soldier; the white-robed chaplain chanting; the
box of light wood, on a frame of black; the coffin draped in the
tricolor, a squad of twenty soldiers following the dead. That is the
funeral of the middle-aged man. There is no time wasted on him in the
brisk business of war; but his comrades bury him. One in particular
faithful at funerals I had learned to know--M. Le Doze. War itself is so
little the respecter of persons that this man had found himself of value
in paying the last small honor to the obscure dead as they were carried
from his Red Cross post to the burial-ground. One hopes that he will
receive no hasty trench burial when his own time comes.

I cannot write of the middle-aged man of the Belgians because he has
been killed. That first mixed army, which in thin line opposed its body
to an immense machine, was crushed by weight and momentum. Little is
left but a memory. But I shall not forget the veteran officer of the
first army, near Lokeren, who kept his men under cover while he ran out
into the middle of the road to see if the Uhlans were coming. The only
Belgian army today is an army of boys. Recently we had a letter from
Andre Simont, of the "Obusiers Lourdes, Beiges," and he wrote:

If you promise me you will come back for next summer, I won't get
pinked. If I ever do, it doesn't matter. I have had twenty years of
very happy life.

If he were forty-five, he would say, as a French officer at Coxyde said
to me:

"Four months, and I haven't heard from my wife and children. We had a
pleasant home. I was well to do. I miss the good wines of my cellar.
This beer is sour. We have done our best, we French, our utmost, and it
isn't quite enough. We have made a supreme effort, but it hasn't cleared
the enemy from our country. _La guerre--c'est triste._"

He, too, fights on, but that overflow of vitality does not visit him, as
it comes to the youngsters of the first line. It is easy for the boys of
Brittany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch Fusiliers
Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve
months made Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-line, a
great rock. It is easy, because there is a glory in the