My stay is of indeterminate
length, and only until the polite but insistent pressure which the
Kaiser's secret police and the General Staff are bringing to bear on
their unbidden guest to leave becomes irresistible.
It was a sometime TIMES reader, a German brakeman, who had worked in New
York and was proud of being able to speak "American," who helped me to
slip aboard the military postzug (post train) that left the important
military centre of L---- at 1:30 A.M. and started to crawl toward the
front with a mixed cargo of snoring field chaplains, soldiers rejoining
their units, officers with iron crosses pinned to their breasts,
ambulance men who talked gruesome shop, fresh meat, surgical supplies,
mail bags, &c. Sometimes the train would spurt up to twelve miles an
hour. There were long stops at every station, while unshaven Landsturm
men on guard scanned the car windows in search of spies by the light of
their electric flash lamps. After many hours somebody said we were now
in Belgium.
There are no longer any bothersome customs formalities at the Belgian
border, but the ghost of a house that had been knocked into a cocked hat
by a shell indicated that we were in the land of the enemy. Houses that
looked as if they had been struck by a Western cyclone now became more
numerous.
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