Thereafter, whenever we saw German troops on the march through a country new to them we looked aloft for the thing with the droopy wings and the black cross on its yellow abdomen.

Sooner or later it appeared, coming always out of nowhere and vanishing always into space.

We were never disappointed.

It is only the man who expects the German army to forget something needful or necessary who is disappointed.
It was late in the afternoon when we bade farewell to the three-hundred- pound proprietress of the Belgian Lion and sought to reach the center of the town through byways not yet blocked off by the marching regiments.
When we were perhaps halfway to our destination we met a town bellman and a town crier, the latter being in the uniform of a Garde Civique.
The bellringer would ply his clapper until he drew a crowd, and then the Garde Civique would halt in an open space at the junction of two or more streets and read a proclamation from the burgomaster calling on all the inhabitants to preserve their tranquillity and refrain from overt acts against the Germans, under promise of safety if they obeyed and threat of death at the hands of the Germans if they disregarded the warning.
This word-of-mouth method of spreading an order applied only to the outlying sections.

In the more thickly settled districts, where presumably the populace could read and write, proclamations posted on wall and window took its place.