The train crept on. I saw a French inn with a German flag painted over the red signboard. The tracks ran between fields scarred on either side with the brown, muddy craters of shells. At the Longuion Station I watched a German soldier standing on a ladder, painting out all French words within the sweep of his brush. Further on I saw a two-wheeled cart in a deserted farmhouse yard; its shafts were tilted up, and a load of bags rotted on the ground, as though the owner, unhitching the horse, had fled. Almost stopping, so slowly did the train move, it approached a tunnel that the retreating French had blown up. Inky darkness closed in, and the Ober-Lieutenant was saying that the Germans were digging the tunnel out, when a yellow torch flared against the window. I sprang to open it and saw the ghostly forms of soldiers standing along the rails. "_Zeitung! Zeitung!_" they cried, and in answer we tossed out to them all the newspapers in the compartment. You had a feeling that the tunnel was dangerous, for the shaky, temporary wooden trestle was yielding to the train's weight. The tunnel marked the beginning of a destroyed railroad and, as we proceeded, I found myself looking into a house flush against the track. It was like a room on the stage, the fourth wall removed. All the intimate possessions of the owner were before me; the pink wall paper was hideous in its flamboyant bad taste. Herrmann came to my rescue. "The tracks from now are either repaired or laid new by our engineers. As they retreated, the French blew up everything. In some cases we had to run our line through houses." The engineers had cut away the half of the house which was in their way and left the remainder to be boarded up. A gray castle, that crowned a hill, had been the vortex of the terrific fighting that raged around Montmédy. It seemed tranquil enough now. I saw the front door open, and down the terrace there shuffled a squad of baggy red-trousered French prisoners with their watchful guards. When we passed through Sedan it was almost dark, swarming with the Germans as in 1870. One after another we tarried at the stations of these captured towns. Finally we pulled up to a larger station where the shadowy forms of houses were closer together. I was awakened from my speculations by the Ober-Lieutenant saying: "We are in Charleville, the Great Headquarters." As I left the train I felt a thrill of anticipation that grew apace during the long explanation that Herrmann was giving the station guards. Outside loomed the vague tops of trees, and the whiteness of a house accentuated against the dark night. Here and there a solitary light burned, but Charleville was a place of darkness. Herrmann had expected an automobile to be waiting, but when to the saluting click of sentries' heels, we had gone the length of the station front, he said to me: "You please get Mr. Dawson and Mr. Theyer and wait in the dining-room. I shall walk to Headquarters and see what we are to do."