As the cortege—­I suppose you might call it that—­went by where I stood with my friends, I saw that upon the sides of the coffins names were lettered in big, straggly black letters.  I read two of the names—­ Werner was one, Vogel was the other.  Somehow I felt an acuter personal interest in Vogel and Werner than in the other five whose names I could not read.

Wherever we stopped in Belgium or in France or in Germany these soldiers’ funerals were things of daily, almost of hourly occurrence.  And in Maubeuge on this evening, even though dusk had fallen, two of the inevitable yellow boxes, mounted upon a two-wheeled cart, were going to the burying ground.  We figured the cemetery men would fill the graves by lantern light; and knowing something of their hours of employment we imagined that with this job disposed of they would probably turn to and dig graves by night, making them ready against the needs of the following morning.  The new graves always were ready.  They were made in advance, and still there were rarely enough of them, no matter how long or how hard the diggers kept at their work.  At Aix-la-Chapelle, for example, in the principal cemetery the sexton’s men dug twenty new graves every morning.  By evening there would be twenty shaped mounds of clay where the twenty holes had been.  The crop of the dead was the one sure crop upon which embattled Europe might count.  That harvest could not fail the warring nations, however scanty other yields might be.

In the towns in occupied territory the cemeteries were the only actively and constantly busy spots to be found, except the hospitals.  Every schoolhouse was a hospital; indeed I think there can be no schoolhouse in the zone of actual hostilities that has not served such a purpose.  In their altered aspects we came to know these schoolhouses mighty well.  We would see the wounded going in on stretchers and the dead coming out in boxes.  We would see how the blackboards, still scrawled over perhaps with the chalked sums of lessons which never were finished, now bore pasted-on charts dealing in nurses’ and surgeons’ cipher-manual, with the bodily plights of the men in the cots and on the mattresses beneath.  We would see classrooms where plaster casts and globe maps and dusty textbooks had been cast aside in heaps to make room on desktops and shelves for drugs and bandages and surgical appliances.  We would see the rows of hooks intended originally for the caps and umbrellas of little people; but now from each hook dangled the ripped, bloodied garments of a soldier—­gray for a German, brown-tan for an Englishman, blue-and-red for a Frenchman or a Belgian.  By the German rule a wounded man’s uniform must be brought back with him from the place where he fell and kept handily near him, with tags on it, to prove its proper identity, and there it must stay until its owner needs it again—­if ever he needs it again.