pretty close to his diggings. Had a great time at a little town called
Neerwinden, where we stayed about half an hour. A crowd of soldiers
from our train joined a group cooking supper in the moonlight at one
of the soup kitchens along the tracks. They fed me lukewarm stew
and slabs of rye bread, then went on singing and arguing without
paying much attention to me. One bald-headed, stocky private told
the crowd the news that von Hindenburg had captured Warsaw. Later
a crowd of big brutes, apparently pretty drunk, swaggered down and
clapped me on the back with a 'Who are you, my friend?'

"'Amerikaner,' I explained, not thinking it necessary to mention the war
correspondent part. They set up a cheer, clapped me on the back,
and finally lifted me to their shoulders for a triumphal ride up and
down the railroad ties, all the time yelling out 'Amerikaner! Hurrah!
Amerikaner!'

"A few hundred years seemed the night we spent locked in that
box-car prison. A five-days' equinoctial storm had given way to the
coldest day of the autumn: our car, raw and dank as a dungeon, joggled
along endlessly until afternoon gave way to evening and evening to
chilly night. Hour after hour we looked out upon the rolling fields and
burnt farmhouses along the path where General von Emmich's army had
passed. As the moon crawled up over the rain-bathed foothills of the
Ourthe Mountains, the temperature dropped far below the freezing point.
For ages we lay awake braced against the cold. The soldier next me, who
had been through the fight at Maubeuge, coughed throughout the night--a
hollow, retching cough. "Tuberculosis," the Red Cross doctor told me,
although the fellow had got through his army tests all right.

Between two and four in the morning we stuck in the middle of a