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.