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Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written at and Near the Front by Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb
page 134 of 310 (43%)
aside for us to pass and pulled off his hat to us. This was Europe as
it used to be--Europe as most American tourists knew it.

We came to a tall barber pole which a careless painter had striped with
black on white instead of with red on white, and we knew by that we had
arrived at the frontier. Also, there stood alongside the pole a royal
forest ranger in green, with a queer cockaded hat on his head, doing
sentry duty. As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a
ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out
of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us,
not pears, but papers. Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few
rods by soldiers begging for papers. Some had small wooden sign-boards
bearing the word Zeitung, which they would lift and swing across the
path of an approaching automobile. I began to believe after a while
that if a man had enough newspapers in stock he could bribe his way
through the German troops clear into France.

These fellows who gathered about us now were of the Landsturm, men in
their late thirties and early forties, with long, shaggy mustaches.
Their kind forms the handle of the mighty hammer whose steel nose is
battering at France. Every third one of them wore spectacles, showing
that the back lines of the army are extensively addicted to the favorite
Teutonic sport of being nearsighted. Also, their coat sleeves
invariably were too long for them, and hid their big hands almost to the
knuckles. This is a characteristic I have everywhere noted among the
German privates. If the French soldier's coat is over-lengthy in the
skirt the German's is ultra-generous with cloth in the sleeves. I saw
that their hair was beginning to get shaggy, showing that they had been
in the field some weeks, since every German soldier--officer and private
alike--leaves the barracks so close-cropped that his skin shows pinky
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