More often than not the trains did not stop. Once as a train was rolling through the station a soldier called to me asking for the newspaper I held in my hand. Of course I gave it to him, sprinting along the platform at a lively rate. The next time I saw a train coming I ran to the newsstand and bought three francs’ worth of papers, about as many as I could carry, and had them ready for rapid distribution to the effusive and laughing soldiers. But right in the middle of that exciting procession of trains came something that brought my heart to my throat. It was an immensely long train of all new cars, painted olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters on the side. And the cars, dozens and dozens of them, were loaded with railroad building material. Portable tracks, switches, signals, exactly like the expensive and fascinating toy railroads which children delight in. Steel rails, wooden ties, machinery for laying them, flat cars, wheels, tools and nails, and last of all tiny little locomotives, two of them to a flat car, all American, going up to the front with the French and the English soldiers. Right behind that train of cars came another, a shorter one, and this was full of brown-clad American engineers, going up to the front with the allied soldiers, to lay those tracks and operate that little narrow-gauge railroad under gun-fire. Our own sons. That was not all. In the middle of the afternoon another train went northward, olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters. This was a hospital train of entirely new cars, the finest and most complete I had ever seen. It was a palace on wheels, with every conceivable appliance for the comfort of wounded soldiers. There were kitchen cars, operating cars, X-ray compartments, cars with beds, cars with couches for the sitting cases. Cars for doctors and nurses as well as patients. Nothing I had seen, not even men going into the trenches, brought home to me so sharply the fact that we were in the war and were fully determined to hold our end up. We could not have done it so well had we not, in the last fifty years, developed such extraordinary railroad builders and operators. The French had a railroad system adequate for peace-time uses, but when war came, and especially after the tide of Americans began to pour into the country, the system had to be enormously enlarged. It had to be planned and organized also, in order not to disturb unduly the life of the country. And it had to be done quickly.