But the soldiers’ position was unfortunate mostly because his force was not large enough to awe the Indian into peace without fighting. For no one more than the Indian respected _size_. He was an expert scout and had a keen eye for numbers. One hundred thousand soldiers would doubtless have cut the losses in half. And had the government used the Indian with common decency, they would have been cut to nothing. We talk a lot about the violation of Belgium and we are justly enraged at the Germans. But the Germans at least didn’t murder their soldiers in addition to their enemies. Are there lice on our eyebrows? Are there sins of our own? Greater sins? _XI_ THE BLACK HOLE One day in Texas after a long hike through broiling heat and alkali dust, we came at last to our camping-place. Weary officers and men went about their appointed tasks of setting up tentage, attending to the water-supply and sanitation and generally making the place livable. After a brief meal from rattling mess-kits, most of us lay down to get the kinks out of our muscles. One company on a little hill in plain view of the rest of the brigade, was resting quietly under its pup-tents. Suddenly a Texas twister, one of those little mysterious whirlwinds, came tearing along out of the silent, clear afternoon. It pounced upon the most conspicuous tent, grabbed the canvas and personal covering off the big First Sergeant, lifted them high in the air, and left him lying in the open like a plucked chicken. A thousand pairs of eyes fastened on him. He slowly awoke, rubbed his face, squirmed a little and squinted at his coverings swishing about in the heavens. “Well,” he said, “Who in the devil started that?”--and rushed threateningly toward the nearest group of soldiers. The American people, after a sleep of a quarter of a century, woke up one morning in 1898 to find that a twister out of the blue had pitched the battleship Maine to the bottom of Havana Harbor, and tossed us into war. Amazed, we asked, “Who started that?” Amazed, we said, “How could war have come upon us?” Amazed and confused we rushed threateningly this way and that. And why the surprise when for three years we’d been shaking angry fists at the Spaniard--when we’d been lying in the path of twisters from a land of twisters. And how completely we’d been lying.