Bands no longer play the forces into the fight--
indeed I have seen no more bands afield with the dun-colored files of
the Germans than I might count on the fingers of my two hands; and
flags, except on rare show-off occasions, do not float above the heads
of the columns; and officers dress as nearly as possible like common
soldiers; and the courier's work is done with much less glamour but with
in-, finitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone, and by
the aeroplane man, and most of all by the air currents of the wireless
equipment. We missed the gallant courier, but then the wireless was
worth seeing too.
It stood in a trampled turnip field not very far beyond the ruined Porte
St. Martin at the end of the Rue St. Martin, and before we came to it we
passed the Monument des Instituteurs, erected in 1899--as the
inscription upon it told us--by a grateful populace to the memory of
three school teachers of Laon who, for having raised a revolt of
students and civilians against the invader in the Franco-Prussian War,
were taken and bound and shot against a wall, in accordance with the
system of dealing with ununiformed enemies which the Germans developed
hereabouts in 1870 and perfected hereabouts in 1914.
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