As we stopped to show him our permits, and to give him a ripe pear and a Cologne paper, half a dozen soldiers came tumbling out of the guardroom in the little customhouse, and ran up to beg from us, not pears, but papers.

Clear to Liege we were to be importuned every few rods by soldiers begging for papers.

Some had small wooden sign-boards bearing the word Zeitung, which they would lift and swing across the path of an approaching automobile.

I began to believe after a while that if a man had enough newspapers in stock he could bribe his way through the German troops clear into France.
These fellows who gathered about us now were of the Landsturm, men in their late thirties and early forties, with long, shaggy mustaches.
Their kind forms the handle of the mighty hammer whose steel nose is battering at France.

Every third one of them wore spectacles, showing that the back lines of the army are extensively addicted to the favorite Teutonic sport of being nearsighted.