Six-fifteen p.m. We have dined. The omelet was a very small omelet,
and two skinny pullets do not go far among nine hungry men; still, we
have dined.

My journal breaks off with this entry. It broke off because immediately
after dinner word came that our train was ready. A few minutes before
we left the taverne for the station, to start on a trip that was to last
two days instead of three hours, and land us not in Brussels, but on
German soil in Aix-la-Chapelle, two incidents happened which afterward,
in looking back on the experience, I have found most firmly clinched in
my memory: A German captain came into the place to get a drink; he
recognized me as an American and hailed me, and wanted to know my
business and whether I could give him any news from the outside world.
I remarked on the perfection of his English.

"I suppose I come by it naturally," he said. "I call myself a German,
but I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and partly reared in New Jersey,
and educated at Princeton; and at this moment I am a member of the New
York Cotton Exchange."

Right after this three Belgian peasants, all half-grown boys, were
brought in. They had run away from their homes at the coming of the
Germans, and for three days had been hiding in thickets, without food,
until finally hunger and cold had driven them in.

All of them were in sorry case and one was in collapse. He trembled so
his whole body shook like jelly. The landlady gave him some brandy, but
the burning stuff choked his throat until it closed and the brandy ran
out of his quivering blue lips and spilled on his chin. Seeing this, a
husky German private, who looked as though in private life he might be a