spraddle his limbs and where also, persons passing the length of the car
stepped upon his face and figure from time to time. This interfered
with his rest. The remaining six of us mortised ourselves into the seats
in neck-cricking attitudes, with our legs so intertwined and mingled
that when one man got up to stretch himself he had to use great care in
picking out his own legs. Sometimes he could only tell that it was his
leg by pinching it. This was especially so after inaction had put his
extremities to sleep while the rest of him remained wide awake.

After dawn we ran slowly to Charleroi, the center of the Belgian iron
industry, in a sterile land of mines and smelters and slag-heaps, and
bleak, bare, ore-stained hillsides. The Germans had fought here, first
with organized troops of the Allies, and later, by their own telling,
with bushwhacking civilians. Whole rows of houses upon either side of
the track had been ventilated by shells or burned out with fire, and
their gable ends, lacking roofs, now stood up nakedly, fretting the
skyline like gigantic saw teeth. As we were drawing out from between
these twin rows of ruins we saw a German sergeant in a flower plot
alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump
of tall red geraniums. That he could find time in the midst of that
hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically
German bit of sentimentalism. Just then, though, he stood erect and we
were better informed. He had been talking over a military telephone,
the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter
snuggling beneath the geraniums. The flowers even were being made to
contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism of war. I think,
though, that it took a composite German mind to evolve that expedient.
A Prussian would bring along the telephone; a Saxon would bed it among
the blossoms.