If we entered a square it was bound to be jammed
with horses and packed baggage trains and supply wagons. The atmosphere
was laden with the ropy scents of the boiling stews and with the heavier
smells of the soldiers' unwashed bodies and their sweating horses.
Finally, to their credit be it said, we personally did not see one
German, whether officer or private, who mistreated any citizen, or was
offensively rude to any citizen, or who refused to pay a fair reckoning
for what he bought, or who was conspicuously drunk. The postcard venders
of Louvain must have grown fat with wealth; for, next to bottled beer
and butter and cheap cigars, every common soldier craved postcards above
all other commodities.
We grew tired after a while of seeing Germans; it seemed to us that
every vista always had been choked with unshaved, blond, blocky, short-
haired men in rawhide boots and ill-fitting gray tunics; and that every
vista always would be. It took a new kind of gun, or an automobile with
a steel prow for charging through barbed-wire entanglements, or a group
of bedraggled Belgian prisoners slouching by under convoy, to make us
give the spectacle more than a passing glance.
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