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On the
verandas of funny little gray roadhouses with dripping red roofs
officers sat over their breakfast coffee. A string of wagons passed us,
bound inward, full of big, white, clean-looking German pigs. A road
builder, repairing the ruts made by the guns and baggage trains, stood
aside for us to pass and pulled off his hat to us. This was Europe as
it used to be--Europe as most American tourists knew it.
We came to a tall barber pole which a careless painter had striped with
black on white instead of with red on white, and we knew by that we had
arrived at the frontier. Also, there stood alongside the pole a royal
forest ranger in green, with a queer cockaded hat on his head, doing
sentry duty. As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a
ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out
of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us,
not pears, but papers. Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few
rods by soldiers begging for papers.


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