The conversation of the officers turned largely on what was happening to their friends and acquaintances in Belgium, about whom they heard by mail through Switzerland or Holland. One young countess aroused considerable discussion. She had been sitting in a street-car in Brussels with a Belgian friend when a German officer boarded the car. Her friend bowed to the officer. "What! You bow to a pig like that!" cried the countess. Whereupon the officer had stopped the car and placed her under arrest. She had been given her choice between two months in prison or ten thousand francs' fine, and had paid the fine. Certain of the officers held that she had been unpatriotic in not accepting imprisonment rather than help the German exchequer. Others felt she had done enough in insulting the officer and rebuking her friend. The talk dwelt, too, on certain other Belgian ladies who had compromised with their patriotism to the extent of taking up social relations with the invaders. From what I heard I feel sorry for these over-hospitable ladies when the Belgians are once more masters of their own country. After lunch I began to feel more and more impatient to get started for the trenches, but I had already learned too much of etiquette at the front to show it. For the officers of all the armies feel that it is infinitely more important to prove to you that they can give you a good cup of coffee and a good cigar than it is to show you the most beautiful battle that was ever fought. They are, too, all alike obsessed with the very human fallacy that the little ingenuities and contrivances which they have devised for their personal comfort, safety or delectation must be of infinitely more absorbing interest to the visitor than the guns and the trenches, which to them are such an old and boring story. So now we had to admire the way one officer had had his sleeping-shack wall-papered, how another had invented some home-made shower-baths, how a third had had a genuine heavy wooden bedstead installed instead of a camp cot. However, finally we made our adieus and motored away with full directions from the General as to how to meet him at 4 o'clock at an observation-post from which he was to witness an interesting bombardment. As it was then a quarter to 3, my hopes of getting into the trenches began to look slim. We were now motoring straight toward the front over a stretch of country which the Germans had been profusely bombarding. The road was full of holes where the Belgian blocks had been torn out by shells. We bumped over the shallower ones and dodged the deeper ones, but every now and then the chauffeur would miscalculate the depth of a hole and the car would come down on its axle with a prodigious thump. By shutting one's eyes one could easily imagine one's self taxicabbing along a New York side-street.