diagnosed their mental poses. Along toward five o'clock a goodish
string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars
seven hundred French soldiers, who had been collected at Gembloux, were
loaded. With the Frenchmen as they marched under our window went,
perhaps, twenty civilian prisoners, including two priests and three or
four subdued little men who looked as though they might be civic
dignitaries of some small Belgian town. In the squad was one big,
broad-shouldered peasant in a blouse, whose arms were roped back at the
elbows with a thick cord.

"Do you see that man?" said one of our guards excitedly, and he pointed
at the pinioned man. "He is a grave robber. He has been digging up
dead Germans to rob the bodies. They tell me that when they caught him
he had in his pockets ten dead men's fingers which he had cut off with a
knife because the flesh was so swollen he could not slip the rings off.
He will be shot, that fellow."

We looked with a deeper interest then at the man whose arms were bound,
but privately we permitted ourselves to be skeptical regarding the
details of his alleged ghoulishness. We had begun to discount German
stories of Belgian atrocities and Belgian stories of German atrocities.
I might add that I am still discounting both varieties.

To help along our train two more little engines were added, but even
with four of them to draw and to shove their load was now so heavy that
we were jerked along with sensations as though we were having a jaw
tooth pulled every few seconds. After such a fashion we progressed very
slowly. Already we knew that we were not going to Brussels, as we had
been promised in Beaumont that we should go. We only hoped we were not
bound for a German military fortress in some interior city.