I think of the tales I have read and the stories I have heard of other great armies: Alaric's war bands and Attila's; the First Crusade; Hannibal's cohorts, and Alexander's host, and Caesar's legions; the Goths and the Vandals; the million of Xerxes--if it was a million--and Napoleon starting for Moscow.
It is of no use.

This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made, man-managed thing.

It seems more like a great, orderly function of Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a mighty wind.

It is hard to believe that it was ever fashioned of thousands of separate atoms, so perfectly is it welded into a whole.

It is harder still to accept it as a mutable and a mortal organism, subject to the shifts of chance and mischance.
And then, on top of this, when one stops to remember that this army of three hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand horses was merely one single cog of the German military machine; that if all the German war strength were assembled together you might add this army to the greater army and hardly know it was there--why, then, the brain refuses to wrestle with a computation so gigantic.