"You like to hear bullets?" I asked. He nodded. Well, I suppose it's a cultivated taste, like German hors d'oeuvres. I began to think of him as of the Saxonians whom I saw drilling in the courtyard in Vis en Artois. Of course he liked this better than piecing together colorless bits of wood in a factory. Not a day passed, probably, but that he got his little thrill, and when the war was over he could go back to the Bronx--if he lived--and be a hero among his friends for the rest of his days. And as I wished him good luck and turned to overtake the others I wondered if this war is going to change the workingman in this way; if he is going to become so accustomed to a spicy existence that he never tasted before, that he will not follow to the humdrum of shops and mills as inevitably as before; rather demanding something more? Beside the door to a dugout I saw on the wall a page torn from a French periodical _L'Illustration_. It was a lay-out of actresses and bicycle riders and it struck you as incongruous until you remembered that the trench had been captured from the French. I saw a profusion of mottoes lettered by the soldiers on their writing paper--_Gott mit uns_. You could not pass a rifle pit--and they are about ten yards apart--without seeing those words of the Emperor that have become the slogan of the German army; and you thought as you saw them, not printed under some official orders and sent to the soldiers so that they would ever have them before them, but written by the men themselves out of the feeling in their hearts, you thought that it is going to be a tremendous job to hold at bay an army, that thinks the Divine is on its side. I noticed that the soldiers try to outdo each other in the individuality of their dugouts. There was one that had a little sign over the door "_Gasthaus zur Kron_" and the soldier inside told me that it was the name of the hotel he owned in his home town. I saw another with three inches of stove pipe protruding from the roof that billed itself as the _Schmaltz Kuchen Bäckerie_, under which was modestly written in pencil "Here is the best kitchen in the world." Delightful these signs, for presently I came upon an exceedingly frank one, the tenant of a dugout having stuck over the door, a shingle upon which was written "_Gasthaus der Wilde Wanze_," which means "The Inn of the Wild Bed Bug."