man-managed thing. It seems more like a great, orderly function of
Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a
mighty wind. It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of
thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly is it welded into a whole. It
is harder still to accept it as a mutable and a mortal organism, subject
to the shifts of chance and mischance.

And then, on top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of
three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one
single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war
strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater
army and hardly know it was there--why, then, the brain refuses to
wrestle with a computation so gigantic. The imagination just naturally
bogs down and quits.

I have already set forth in some detail how it came to pass that we went
forth from Brussels in a taxicab looking for the war; and how in the
outskirts of Louvain we found it, and very shortly thereafter also found
that we were cut off from our return and incidentally had lost not only
our chauffeur and our taxi-cab but our overcoats as well. There being
nothing else to do we made ourselves comfortable along side the Belgian
Lion Cafe in the southern edge of Louvain, and for hours we watched the
advance guard sliding down the road through a fog of white dust.

Each time a break came in the weaving gray lines we fancied this surely
was all. All? What we saw there was a puny dribbling stream compared
with the torrent that was coming. The crest of that living tidal wave
was still two days and many miles to the rearward. We had seen the head
and a little of the neck. The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray
centipede was as yet far behind.