I gulped down the stuff and hoped he had not noticed my manner. I watched him pour out his own drink, holding it like the connoisseur you felt him to be, before the candle flame. He must have been admiring the amber color when footfalls came from without. The under-officer saluted and handed him a bit of paper. Putting down the cognac and returning the salute, the Lieutenant picked up the telephone. I heard him call regimental headquarters, and then reading from the paper, he reported in German: "Fifteen dead--thirty-eight wounded." And laying aside the 'phone he picked up his cognac, slowly sipping it down.... I had seen the men in the trenches and it was at Commines that I saw them out. With a tall young Prussian officer, who told me in entire sincerity that before this war was done Germany was going to invade England and that the plans had all been perfected, but what they were he naturally could not say--I walked along the cobbled street of the old French town until I came to a gray stone factory. Through the paling of a picket fence I saw soldiers moving about in the yard, and going in we walked along a narrow cobbled driveway between dingy workshops until the officer opened a door, and we went into what had been a storeroom. I saw rows of pens, each as wide as a cot and filled with straw, and in the straw lay men. You thought of them as being too exhausted upon coming back from the trenches to take off their uniforms and wash before lying down. I saw their cartridge belts, knapsacks and guns strewn in the straw beside them, and I became conscious of a faint sickening odor that minute by minute became stronger in that stuffy room, the stench of men who had not been able to as much as unloosen their clothing for days at a time. As I walked between the pens I saw further on that some of the men were awake. I saw their faces; the others seemed all to sleep with their faces buried in the straw; and they were wild, unshaven faces, yellowish with mud, and bleary with sleepless eyes that somehow could not sleep now. There was one munching on a big chunk of black bread, and another who had been leaning on his elbow, writing a letter, jumped up as I passed. "You're an American, aren't you?" he called after me. I saw from the blue and white button on his cap that he belonged to one of the Bavarian regiments. "I lived in the United States," he told me, "until the war came. Then I joined my regiment. I was the cashier of a bank in Juarez, and I lived across the river. I used to make my money in Mexico and live in America." He went on telling me of his experiences and obligingly answering certain questions that must have sounded foolish to him. "We work here in the army," he said, "seven day shifts. We're in the trenches forty-eight hours and then out for twenty-four hours' rest; in again for twenty-four and then out for three days." I asked him what the men did during the last three days and he told me.