Also, they have taken the bad tidings of the last few days from France very quietly.
During the afternoon crowds will gather on the viaduct, just above the principal railroad station, where they will stand for hours looking down over the parapet into the yards below.

There will be smaller crowds on the heights of Ronheide, on the edge of the town, where the tracks enter the long tunnel under one of the hills that etch the boundary between Germany and Belgium.
Rain or shine, these two places are sure to be black with people, for here they may see the trains shuttle by, like long bobbins in a loom that never ceases from its weaving--trains going west loaded with soldiers and naval reservists bound for the front, and trains headed east bearing prisoners and wounded.

The raw material passes one way-- that's the new troops; the finished product passes the other--the wounded and the sick.
When wounded men go by there will be cheering, and some of the women are sure to raise the song of Die Wacht am Rhein; and within the cars the crippled soldiers will take up the chorus feebly.

God knows how many able-bodied soldiers already have gone west; how many maimed and crippled ones have gone east! In the first instance the number must run up into the second million; of the latter there must have been well above two hundred thousand.
No dead come back from the front--at least, not this way.

The Germans bury their fallen soldiers where they fall.