"Deutschland uber Alles!" and wondering what he might be thinking about
the great game of war fifteen years from now.

While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host walked up and
down the cafe, delivering himself on the subject of mines in the North
Sea. The Germans began it, now the English must take it up; but as for
him, speaking as one who had followed the sea, it was poor business. Why
couldn't people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a
ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives?

Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man whom I had
last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently on the orderlies'
bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly. The ambulance is as hard to
get into as an exclusive club, for the woods are full these days of
volunteers who, leading rather decorative lives in times of peace, have
been shaken awake by the war into helping out overtaxed embassies,
making beds in hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike
delight in the novelty of work. This young man wore a Red Cross button
now and paused long enough to impart the following--characteristic of
the things we non-combatants hear daily, and which, authentic or not,
help to "make life interesting":

1. An English general just down from the front had told him that four
thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial party after the fighting
along the Yser, and had buried, by actual count, thirty-nine thousand
Germans.

2. In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German and Indian
wounded were put in the same ward. In the night the Indians got up and
cut the Germans' throats.