atmosphere charged with smoke and silence. The smoke came
not from the prisoners, for to them it was forbidden, but from the
soldiers, who rolled it up in great clouds. The silence came from
the suspicion that one's next neighbor might be a spy planted
there to catch him in some unwary statement. Each man would
have sought relief from the strain by unbosoming his hopes and
fears to his neighbor, but he dared not. That is one fearful curse of
any cause that is buttressed by a system of espionage. It scatters
everywhere the seeds of suspicion. All society is shot through with
cynical distrust. It poisons the springs at the very source--one's
faith in his fellows. Ordinarily one regards the next man as a
neighbor until he proves himself a spy. In Europe he is a scoundrel
and a spy until he proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is
a neighbor.

And then one is never certain. People were everywhere aghast to
find even their life-long friends in the pay of the enemy. A large
military establishment draws spies as certainly as a carcass draws
vermin; the one is the inevitable concomitant of the other. It is the
Nemesis of all human brotherhood.

Now to be taken as a prisoner of war was to most men more of a
Godsend than a tragedy. The prisoner knew that he was to be
corralled in a camp. But he was alive at any rate and he had but to
await the end of the war--then it was home again. The pictures
show phalanxes of these men smiling as if they were glad to be
captives. On the other hand there are no smiles in the pictures of
the spies and francs-tireurs. They know that they are fated for a
hasty trial, a drumhead decision, and to be shot at dawn. The
prospect of that walk through the early morning dews to the