_The Red Glutton With the German Army at the Front_ BY IRVIN S. COBB [Illustration] HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. A Little Village Called Montignies St. Christophe 13 II. To War in a Taxicab 27 III. Sherman Said It 52 IV. "Marsch, Marsch, Marsch, So Geh'n Wir Weiter" 82 V. Being a Guest of the Kaiser 109 VI. With the German Wrecking Crew 140 VII. The Grapes of Wrath 164 VIII. Three Generals and a Cook 198 IX. Viewing a Battle from a Balloon 226 X. In the Trenches Before Rheims 251 XI. War de Luxe 262 XII. The Rut of Big Guns in France 294 XIII. Those Yellow Pine Boxes 315 XIV. The Red Glutton 334 XV. Belgium--The Rag Doll of Europe 369 XVI. Louvain the Forsaken 406 CHAPTER I A LITTLE VILLAGE CALLED MONTIGNIES ST. CHRISTOPHE We passed through it late in the afternoon--this little Belgian town called Montignies St. Christophe--just twenty-four hours behind a dust-colored German column. I am going to try now to tell how it looked to us. I am inclined to think I passed this way a year before, or a little less, though I cannot be quite certain as to that. Traveling 'cross country, the country is likely to look different from the way it looked when you viewed it from the window of a railroad carriage. Of this much, though, I am sure: If I did not pass through this little town of Montignies St. Christophe then, at least I passed through fifty like it--each a single line of gray houses strung, like beads on a cord, along a white, straight road, with fields behind and elms in front; each with its small, ugly church, its wine shop, its drinking trough, its priest in black, and its one lone gendarme in his preposterous housings of saber and belt and shoulder straps. I rather imagine I tried to think up something funny to say about the shabby grandeur of the gendarme or the acid flavor of the cooking vinegar sold at the drinking place under the name of wine; for that time I was supposed to be writing humorous articles on European travel. But now something had happened to Montignies St. Christophe to lift it out of the dun, dull sameness that made it as one with so many other unimportant villages in this upper lefthand corner of the map of Europe. The war had come this way; and, coming so, had dealt it a side-slap.