hurried best to cripple the transportation facilities and had certainly
put the local gas plant out of commission. Yet here was illumination in
plenty and to spare. At once the phenomenon stood explained. Two days
after securing this end of the line the German engineers had repaired
the torn-up right-of-way and installed a complete acetylene outfit, and
already they were dispatching trains of troops and munitions clear
across southeastern Belgium to and from the German frontier. When we
heard this we quit marveling. We had by now ceased to wonder at the
lightning rapidity and un-human efficiency of the German military system
in the field.

Under the sizzling acetylene torches we had our first good look at these
prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly prisoners.

Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle. A
soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden
a pitiable, almost a contemptible object. You think instinctively of an
adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of
teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more
impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in
the first place. These similes are poor ones, I'm afraid, but I find it
difficult to put my thoughts exactly into words.

These particular soldiers were most unhappy looking, all except the half
dozen Turcos among the Frenchmen. They spraddled their baggy white legs
and grinned comfortably, baring fine double rows of ivory in their brown
faces. The others mainly were droopy figures of misery and shame. By
reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung down in
their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red trousers
and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed