That this was extended beyond all limits contemplated by military regulations must be attributed to a reluctance to turn out on a dark, wet night, in unknown districts, one of a nation whose intervention, as I was assured, has contributed much to the magnificent spirit with which the Belgian troops have supported the first rush of the "invincible machine." We left Paris with the Boulevards almost as crowded as ever, but with half the colour and light gone, and a note of unusual gravity in the aspect and talk of the moving stream. Out through the long, dark suburbs, with the last signal, the flare of the searchlight from the Eiffel Tower, blinking its messages across the clouds high above our heads in front. In the first two miles we were stopped half-a-dozen times; business-like question and answer in quick, suppressed voices. Then the checks decreased as we ran out into the dark fields, though the flash of light upon arms, the challenge and halt came still at bridge and corner. The 'word of the day' passed us at only reduced pace through the larger pickets, but the less well-informed solitary sentry had to be more fully satisfied; and the more, the further from Paris. Then longer and longer intervals of tremendous racing, unchecked; for the car drove at full speed, and there is no peace traffic! The light of the Eiffel Tower disappeared behind, but there was still the consciousness, in the most remote darkness, that above us darted ceaselessly the continuous stream of wireless messages linking the brain of the army in the little room in unseen Paris with every movement of the vast protecting arms that already lie outstretched to guard France. Through Senlis, Compiègne, St. Quentin, and, at last, Cambrai. It was only possible to calculate the probable towns by the intervals of time, for in each case we were turned off on to side circuits. When I had passed south to Paris a few days before, on a more westerly line, the country had still seemed inhabited, though by a mixed race: crowds of little red and blue soldiers resting, marching, crammed in troop trains, and knots of men and women at the village corners, or staring at the gates of the huge deserted factories. Now it seemed an empty land. All the life had passed east into the great war cloud. Only now and again the flash of the lamp on a cluster of boys and older men, sitting or lying by the road; the non-combatants of the villages from the war region tramping west, with blue check bundles tied on the handles of their reaping hooks, to earn what they could, for the later repair of their losses, by helping to harvest. Need for it, too, as the sight of the immense fields of grain, unreaped or half reaped, yellowing the lonely fields of the uninhabited country, suggest ruin to the traveller passing in the train.