gray transport wagons, gray ammunition carts, gray ambulances,
gray cannon, like a river of steel, cut Brussels in two.

For three weeks the men had been on the march, and there was not
a single straggler, not a strap out of place, not a pennant missing.
Along the route, without for a minute halting the machine, the post-
office carts fell out of the column, and as the men marched mounted
postmen collected post-cards and delivered letters. Also, as they
marched, the cooks prepared soup, coffee, and tea, walking beside
their stoves on wheels, tending the fires, distributing the smoking
food. Seated in the motor-trucks cobblers mended boots and broken
harness; farriers on tiny anvils beat out horseshoes. No officer
followed a wrong turning, no officer asked his way. He followed the
map strapped to his side and on which for his guidance in red ink his
route was marked. At night he read this map by the light of an electric
torch buckled to his chest.

To perfect this monstrous engine, with its pontoon bridges, its
wireless, its hospitals, its aeroplanes that in rigid alignment sailed
before it, its field telephones that, as it advanced, strung wires over
which for miles the vanguard talked to the rear, all modern inventions
had been prostituted. To feed it millions of men had been called from
homes, offices, and workshops; to guide it, for years the minds of the
high-born, with whom it is a religion and a disease, had been solely
concerned.

It is, perhaps, the most efficient organization of modern times; and its
purpose only is death. Those who cast it loose upon Europe are
military-mad. And they are only a very small part of the German
people. But to preserve their class they have in their own image