It is in the spirit of a non-partisan, then, that this chronicle of adventure in those crucial days of the early war is written. It is a welter of experiences and reactions which the future may use as another first-hand document in casting up its own conclusions. There is no careful culling out of just those episodes which support a particular theory, such as the total and complete depravity of the German race.
Despite my British ancestry, the record tries to be impartial-- without pro- or anti-German squint. If the reader had been in my skin, zigzagging his way through five different armies, the things which I saw are precisely the ones which he would have seen. So I am not to blame whether these episodes damn the Germans or bless them. Some do, and some don't. What one ran into was largely a matter of luck.
For example: In Brussels on September 27, 1914, I fell in with a lieutenant of the British army. With an American passport he had made his way into the city through the German lines. We both desired to see Louvain, but all passage thereto was for the moment forbidden. Starting out on the main road, however, sentry after sentry passed us along until we were halted near staff headquarters, a few miles out of the city, and taken before the commandant. We informed him of our overweening desire to view the ruins of Louvain. He explained, as sarcastically as he could, that war was not a social diversion, and bade us make a quick return to Brussels, swerving neither to the right nor left as we went.
As we were plodding wearily back, temptation suddenly loomed up on our right in the shape of a great gas-bag which we at first took to be a Zeppelin. It proved to be a stationary balloon which was acting as the eye of the artillery. It was signaling the range to the German gunners beneath, who were pounding away at the Belgians. In our excitement over the spectacle, we went plunging across fields until we gained a good view of the great swaying thing, tugging away at the slender filament of rope which bound it to the earth.
Sinking down into the grass, we were so intent upon the sharp electric signaling as to be oblivious to aught else, until a voice rang a harsh challenge from behind. Jumping to our feet, we faced a squad of German soldiers and an officer who said: