Their fair sunburned faces were lined with sweat marks and masked under dust, and doubtless some were desperately weary; but I did not see a straggler.

To date I presume I have seen upward of a million of these German soldiers on the march, and I have yet to see a straggler.
For the most part the rank and file were stamped by their faces and their limbs as being of peasant blood or of the petty artisan type; but here and there, along with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker, passed one of a slenderer build, usually spectacled and wearing, even in this employment, the unmistakable look of the cultured, scholarly man.
And every other man, regardless of his breed, held a cheap cigar between his front teeth; but the wagon drivers and many of the cavalrymen smoked pipes--the long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe, which the German loves.

The column moved beneath a smoke-wreath of its own making.
The thing, however, which struck one most forcibly was the absolute completeness, the perfect uniformity, of the whole scheme.

Any man's equipment was identically like any other man's equipment.

Every drinking cup dangled behind its owner's spine-tip at precisely the same angle; every strap and every buckle matched.