mothers brought out a bit
of chocolate, the other a bottle of wine, and so we had supper--a souper
de luxe, as one of them laughed--all, by this time, old friends.

Eleven o'clock--midnight--the gas, intended for a short journey, grew
dimmer and dimmer, presently flickered out. We were in darkness--all
the train was in darkness--we were alone in France, wrapped in war and
moonlight, half real beings who had been adventuring together, not for
hours, but for years. The dim figure on the left sighed, tried one
position and another uneasily, and suddenly said that if it would not
derange monsieur too much, she would try to sleep on his shoulder. It
would not derange monsieur in the least. On the contrary...

"You must make yourself at home in France," laughed the mother of the
two little girls. But the other was even more polite.

"Nous sommes en Amerique!" she murmured. The train jolted slowly on. An
hour or two after midnight it stopped and a strange figure in turban and
white robe peered in. "Complet! Complet!" cried the lady with the
little girls. But the figure kept staring in, and, turning, chattered
to others like him. There was a crowd of them, men from France's
African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had been working in the
French mines and were now going back to take the places of trained
soldiers--the daredevil "Turcos"--sent north to fight the Germans.

They did not get into our compartment, but into the one next to it, and
as there was no place to sit down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and
after a time gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the
floor. They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and
now and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song. In Paris girls
ran into the street and threw their arms about the brave "Marocs" as
they marched by, but the lady with the little girls felt that they were
a trifle smelly, and, fishing out a bottle of scent, she wet a
handkerchief with it and passed it round.

The young Frenchman lit a match--three-twenty. The little boy, rousing
from his corner, suddenly announced, apropos of nothing, that the
Germans ought to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once came
the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep apparently before
this, warning him that he must not talk like that or the Germans might
hear and shoot them. We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one became
aware that the gray light was not that o