I reckon we shall always wonder what became of them, and that we shall never know.  I hoped mightily that the American wing of the big Catholic seminary had been spared.  It had a stone figure of an American Indian—­ looking something like Sitting Bull, we thought—­over its doors; and that was the only typically American thing we saw in all Louvain.

When next I saw Louvain the University was gone and the stone Indian was gone too.

Chapter 5

Being a Guest of the Kaiser

You know how four of us blundered into the German lines in a taxicab; and how, getting out of German hands after three days and back to Brussels, we undertook, in less than twenty-four hours thereafter, to trail the main forces then shoving steadily southward with no other goal before them but Paris.

First by hired hack, as we used to say when writing accounts of funerals down in Paducah, then afoot through the dust, and finally, with an equipment consisting of that butcher’s superannuated dogcart, that elderly mare emeritus and those two bicycles, we made our zigzagging way downward through Belgium.

We knew that our credentials were, for German purposes, of most dubious and uncertain value.  We knew that the Germans were permitting no correspondents—­not even German correspondents—­to accompany them.  We knew that any alien caught in the German front was liable to death on the spot, without investigation of his motives.  We knew all these things; and the knowledge of them gave a fellow tingling sensations in the tips of his toes when he permitted himself to think about his situation.  But, after the first few hours, we took heart unto ourselves; for everywhere we met only kindness and courtesy at the hands of the Kaiser’s soldiers, men and officers alike.

There was, it is true, the single small instance of the excited noncom. who poked a large, unwholesome-looking automatic pistol into my shrinking diaphragm when he wanted me to get off the running board of a military automobile into which I had climbed, half a minute before, by invitation of the private who steered it.  I gathered his meaning right away, even though he uttered only guttural German and that at the top of his voice; a pointed revolver speaks with a tongue which is understood by all peoples.  Besides, he had the distinct advantage in repartee; and so, with no extended argument, I got down from there and he pouched his ironmongery.  I regarded the incident as being closed and was perfectly willing that it should remain closed.

That, however, though of consuming interest to me at the moment, was but a detail—­an exception to prove the standing rule.  One place we dined with a Rittmeister’s mess; and while we sat, eating of their midday ration of thick pea soup with sliced sausages in it, some of the younger officers stood; also they let us stretch our wearied legs on their mattresses, which were ranged seven in a row on the parlor floor of a Belgian house, where from a corner a plaster statue of Joan of Arc gazed at us with her plaster eyes.