tall, preoccupied Swede--under the direction of some hapless officer of
the General Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a
closely articulated programme almost as personally helpless as a package
in a pneumatic tube--night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots
at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel
clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and military salutes. You are
under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or
barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in your
honor; at four you are watching distant shell-fire from the Belgian
dunes; at eleven, crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel,
where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local German
commandant. Everything is done for you--more, of course, than one would
wish--the gifted young captain-conductor speaks English one minute,
French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night,
past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an Ausweis,
contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from a band-box,
and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious
feeling of never having been away at all.

It isn't, of course, an ideal way of working--not like putting on a hat
and strolling out to war, as one sometimes could do in the early weeks
in Belgium and France. The front is a big and rather accidental place,
however--you can scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back
something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of the war.
Our moment came in the German trenches before La Bassée, when, with the
English so near that you could have thrown a baseball into their
trenches, both sides began to toss dynamite bombs at each other.

We had come across to Cologne on the regular night express, shifted to a
military train, and so on through Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the