Never, so far as we could tell, was there any congestion, any hitch, any
suggestion of confusion. Frequently there would come from a sideway a
group of officers on horseback, or a whole string of commandeered
touring cars bearing monocled, haughty staff officers in the tonneaus,
with guards riding beside the chauffeurs and small slick trunks strapped
on behind. A whistle would sound shrilly then; and magically a gap
would appear in the formation. Into this gap the horsemen or the
imperious automobiles would slip, and away the column would go again
without having been disturbed or impeded noticeably. No stage manager
ever handled his supers better; and here, be it remembered, there were
uncountable thousands of supers, and for a stage the twisting, medieval
convolutions of a strange city. Now for a space of minutes it would be
infantry that passed, at the swinging lunge of German foot soldiers on a
forced march. Now it would be cavalry, with accouterments jingling and
horses scrouging in the close-packed ranks; else a battery of the
viperish looking little rapid-fire guns, or a battery of heavier cannon,
with cloth fittings over their ugly snouts, like muzzled dogs whose bark
is bad and whose bite is worse.

Then, always in due order, would succeed the field telegraph corps; the
field post-office corps; the Red Cross corps; the brass band of, say,
forty pieces; and all the rest of it, to the extent of a thousand and
one circus parades rolled together. There were boats for making pontoon
bridges, mounted side by side on wagons, with the dried mud of the River
Meuse still on their flat bottoms; there were baggage trains miles in
length, wherein the supply of regular army wagons was eked out with
nondescript vehicles--even family carriages and delivery vans gathered
up hastily, as the signs on their sides betrayed, from the tradespeople
of a dozen Northern German cities and towns, and now bearing chalk marks
on them to show in what division they belonged. And inevitably at the