"You go out a sort of zoo--our party included four or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian (Italy had not yet gone into the war), a diminutive Spaniard and a tall, preoccupied Swede--under the direction of some hapless officer of the General Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a closely articulated program, almost as helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube--night expresses, racing military motors, snapshots at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and punctilious military salutes. You are under fire one minute, the next shooting through some captured palace or barracks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is turned out in honor, at four you are watching distant shell fire from the Belgian dunes; at eleven crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the local commandant. Everything is done for you--more, of course, than one would wish--the gifted young captain conductor speaks English one minute, French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morning, to bed at night, past countless sentries and thick-headed guards demanding an _Ausweis_, contrives never to cease looking as if he had stepped from the bandbox, and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin with the curious feeling of never having been away at all." There were a great many trips of this sort under the auspices of the German General Staff, and every neutral correspondent who came to Berlin with letters establishing his position as a serious workman in good standing in his own country, could hope, after a reasonable interval for getting acquainted, to obtain permission to go on one of them. It was not an ideal way of working, to be sure, yet the "front" was a big and rather accidental place, and one could scarcely touch it anywhere without bringing back something to help complete the civilian's puzzle picture of war. One man would get a chance to spend a night in the trenches, with the sky criss-crossed with searchlight shafts and illuminating bombs; an automobile party might be caught on some East Prussian road with the woods on either side crackling with rifle fire as the skirmishers beat through the timber after the scattered enemy as after so many squirrels. Our moment came one afternoon in the German trenches at Givenchy, when, with the English trenches only a stone's throw away, both sides began to amuse themselves by shooting dynamite bombs.