Of the waste and wreckage of war; of desolated homes and shattered
villages; of the ruthless, relentless, punitive exactness with which the
Germans punished not only those civilians they accused of firing on them
but those they suspected of giving harbor or aid to the offenders; of
widows and orphans; of families of innocent sufferers, without a roof to
shelter them or a bite to stay them; of fair lands plowed by cannon
balls, and harrowed with rifle bullets, and sown with dead men's bones;
of men horribly maimed and mangled by lead and steel; of long mud
trenches where the killed lay thick under the fresh clods--of all this
and more I saw enough to cure any man of the delusion that war is a
beautiful, glorious, inspiring thing, and to make him know it for what
it is--altogether hideous and unutterably awful.

As for Uhlans spearing babies on their lances, and officers sabering
their own men, and soldiers murdering and mutilating and torturing at
will--I saw nothing. I knew of these tales only from having read them
in the dispatches sent from the Continent to England, and from there
cabled to American papers.

Even so, I hold no brief for the Germans; or for the reasons that
inspired them in waging this war; or for the fashion after which they
have waged it. I am only trying to tell what I saw with my own eyes and
heard with my own ears.

Be all that as it may, we straggled into Beaumont--five of us--on the
evening of the third day out from Brussels, without baggage or
equipment, barring only what we wore on our several tired and drooping
backs. As in the case of our other trip, a simple sight-seeing ride had
resolved itself into an expeditionary campaign; and so there we were,