The whole thing grew out of the fact that so many of the men in France are mobilized that they haven’t enough left for train conductors and station guards. You can travel for hundreds of miles in France and never have your ticket taken up by anybody. I have a collection of French railroad tickets which I bought and used, but never had to show to a conductor. One of these tickets entitled me to ride first class from Bourges to a certain large American military camp. I bought the ticket one morning last spring and was informed by the polite Frenchman behind the wicket that it would be necessary for me to change at a junction about midway in the journey. “They allow you barely five minutes to make the change,” he warned me, “but you can not miss the train. It is the Paris express.” We were slightly delayed, and when I reached the junction I made a quick leap to the station platform and looked around for my train. There were several standing there, so I ran, suit-case in one hand and typewriter in the other, in search of a guard. There was only one, but I hailed him and asked him to indicate the Paris express. “Platform three,” he exclaimed. “But, hurry, hurry, madame. Already the train he marches.” And surely enough the queer little tin whistle which is a characteristic of French trains was shrilling its starting signal and the doors of the carriages were slamming. I dashed across the tracks and almost into a young officer who was looking wildly around and calling in English for a porter. Seeing my O. D. uniform, he recognized a compatriot, and implored me to tell him, if I knew, which train he should take to go to Y----. “Come along,” I flung back at him, for I was still racing for that moving train. “I’m going there, too.” We just made it, flinging my suit-case and typewriter in, and falling in after them ourselves. The lieutenant had no luggage. I was tired, having been up late the night before, and without any more conversation I curled up in a corner and went to sleep. I must have slept for an hour, and after I awoke the train rolled on for another hour without coming to Y----. We were alone in the compartment, and no conductor appeared. So I spoke to the young officer. “I thought Y---- was only about an hour and a half from the junction,” I remarked. “I thought so, too,” he answered. “But I don’t speak a word of French, so I don’t always get very precise information.” “Well, the guard told me that this was the Paris express,” I said. “We must be on the right train.” We commented on the singular lack of train conductors, and the lieutenant said yes, you could travel all over France free if you had luck. He had traveled for forty-eight hours for one franc and eighty centimes. At least, the only ticket he had been asked to surrender cost one franc eighty. The rest were in his pocket.