h green
branches and scrawled over with chalked witticism at the expense of the
French and Russians. The men cheer as our train passes. A few kilometers
further backed on to a siding, is a train of some twenty flatcars, each
loaded with a touring car. Then we pass a battery of artillery on
flatcars, the guns still garlanded with flowers; then a short freight
train--six cars loaded with nothing but spare automobile tires--then a
long train of heavy motor trucks, then more infantry trains, then an
empty hospital train going back for another load, then a train of
gasoline tank cars, more cheering infantry, more artillery, another
empty hospital train, a pioneer train, a score of flatcars loaded with
long, heavy piles, beams, steel girders, bridge spans, and lumber, then
a passenger train load of German railway officials and servants going to
operate the railways toward the coast, more infantry, food trains,
ammunition trains, train loads of railway tracks already bolted to metal
ties and merely needing to be laid down and pieced together, and so on
in endless succession all through France and through Belgium. The
two-track road, shaky in spots, especially when crossing rivers, is
being worked to capacity, and how well the huge traffic is handled is
surprising even to an American commuter.

Our fast train stops at the mouth of a tunnel, then crawls ahead
charily, for the French, before retreating, dynamited the tunnel. One
track has been cleared, but the going is still bad. To keep it from
being blocked again by falling debris the Germans have dug clean through
the top of the hill, opening up a deep well of light into the tunnel.
Looking up, you see a pioneer company in once cream-colored, now
dirty-colored, fatigue uniform still digging away and terracing the
sides of the big hole to prevent slides. Half an hour later we go slow
again in crossing a new wooden bridge over the Meuse--only one track as
yet. It took the German pioneers nearly a week to build the substitute
for the old steel railway bridge dynamited by the French, whose four
spans lie buckled up in the river. The pioneers are at work driving
piles to carry a second track. The process is interesting. A
forty-man-power pile driver is rigged upon the bow end of a French river
barge with forty soldiers tugging at forty strands of the main rope.
The "gang" foreman, a Captain in field gray, stands on the river bank
and bellows the word of command. Up goes the heavy i