I touched. My machine ran along, bumping over hundreds of bodies lightly covered by the new snow. I got out, stumbled over them at my feet, felt them. They were not long dead. I looked about me at the dark, silent city of Mannheim. A panic took me. I ran to my machine, tried to get it off, but failed and sat numb and transfixed, vainly groping in the darkness of my mind for the thought that would not form, till my comrades came to me with blanched faces and bit by bit in swift succession pieced for me the words that could not find utterance, having never been uttered in the world's life before. The rest--a flowing phantasmagoria that tore me too far out of human experience, even of dream--to tell again. The thousands crumpled up in full-dress uniform, stained and tattered, beneath the new snow of the parade-ground, fallen at a moment, at a word, hands here and there stiffened in salute to the flag slow moving in the graying winter's dawn. Death we had seen,--but here in the streets and in the houses, in all corners and in all byways, the vivid faces of those who had sought death freely, each face telling with ghastly eloquence a tale that had never been told in the life of man, of a race self-destroyed at a moment, at a word, for a vision which it alone had understood, leaving its epitaph in the words on the poison vials which a government machine efficient to the last had supplied--"_Der Tag ist zu uns_"--"The Day is Ours." Then through the blenching words that flashed along the closed circle of steel in all the tongues of Europe, the shrinking thought leaped to our dumb, numb mind and throbbed upon them like the insistent resounding clangor of a titanic brazen shield, as if beaten by a grimacing god: Germany is yours, O sons of men! What now? * * * * * I woke at dawn to the boisterous, bold boom of the batteries of Metz. They seemed to speak in glorious wide-mouthed joy of Til Eulenspiegel and the young Siegfried. I thanked God for the Germans. THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11] BY HARRIS MERTON LYON From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_ [11] Copyright, 1915, by The Illustrated Sunday Magazine. Copyright, 1916, by Harris Merton Lyon. I had always felt vaguely that there must be at times an intense pathos which overcame the master-worker in perishable materials--the actor in his supreme moment; the singer, the musician--I thought--must feel a bitter regret that his glory cannot live but must die, _in articulo gloriæ_, with the sound, the effect he has created. Bernhardt seemed to me to have that in the back of her mind when she exulted over her appearance in the moving pictures. "I am immortal," she cried, dramatically--always dramatic, that old lady--"I am a film." So thin a bridge to immortality!