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 stretched barbed wire and brambles over the loose stones ... to encourage the Uhlans. As you approached from without you saw the wicked eyes of the street trenches, and the grass-grown mounds of the old fortifications, winking down at you. The town was held by an outpost of three or four companies.

"Sir! American Sir!" said one of the pioupious, in the sort of English which an Antwerp Fleming who has spent two years among Scotchmen in the United States may be expected to speak. "Fourth Infantry of the Line at your service! We have two things only which we greatly much desire: Cigarettes and Revenge!"

On the other side of the town a battery of artillery, magnificently horsed, was waiting under the trees for any alarm. Most of the horses were Irish. I felt a little nostalgia as I rubbed the sensitive nose of a roan mare. I wished that I had with me a poet or two of the Celtic renaissance to make a poem telling her how she had begun at the fair of Ballina, or Moy, or perhaps Ballsbridge itself, and how she would wander the white roads of Europe—not white now, but red—and die at last over there on the banks of the Rhine near pleasant Coblenz, or many-pinnacled Cologne. There being no poet about, I could but