From the church we walked to a tall, gray stone, square-turreted building that loomed above everything in the village and passing through a wide archway we came into a court filled with drilling soldiers. I wondered what it could have been before the war, for the stacks of hay and the manure piles were wholly incongruous. Clearly, it now was being utilized as a transport station, for at the end of the court I saw four empty, gray, canvas-covered wagons. Turning to the soldiers, you were instantly struck by the fact that they were smaller than any you had ever seen in uniforms. All of the same size divided into squads, each in the hands of a drill sergeant. I watched them doing the "goose steps," to the proud clapping of their boots on the cobbled court, while others marched by briskly in twos, saluting. It was the barest rudimentary training that they were being put through--but it was stiffening them for the firing line--and as they drilled these raw troops, I could hear in the distance the drumming of the guns. It seemed to electrify these stocky little fellows in the new uniforms, for their feet stamped the louder, and their saluting hands snapped up like automatons; and I wondered if it were hard to content yourself with harmless drilling in a manure-strewn yard, with the music of war playing for you to march; or if behind any of those stupid, utterly peasant faces there lurked a craven thought that they were glad to be there and not where those shells were bursting. But as I watched them and felt the eagerness with which they went about the drill, I found myself thinking of the craving I had seen the Jews of New York's Ghetto show for education and that these stolid peasants were just as eager to learn that they might go to war. And I wondered if after all it might not be a lark for the youth in them, better than giving themselves day after day to an industrialism that made them old before their time. Was it not better than trudging off in the morning to the blowing of a whistle? I asked Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann where they came from. "They are all Saxonians," he explained; and I remembered what a German Socialist had told me, that the low laboring class of Saxony is notoriously poor and short-lived, their years taken by work in the mines. No wonder they had pranced at the roll of the guns! They were thinking of it as a deliverance.... Into what? We walked under the gray arch and across the muddy street into a paved school yard, where evergreen hedges bloomed in pretty red tubs. The sun, as if to make up to those rain-soaked men who crouched in the trenches but six kilometers away, streamed down, as in a glory before its setting, and as the school yard rung to the fall of our heavy boots, it seemed for a moment as if the brown door must open and children come pouring forth. [Illustration: "We came to a court filled with drilling soldiers."]