The corporal took us to the Marseilles train, gave us his blessing, smoked a cigarette, and waited patiently until the train started. We travelled alone. But France ran no danger of losing her recruits on the way. The fact that we were intended for the Foreign Legion was written on our military ticket in howling big red letters. The conductor watched with great care. He was a Frenchman and a patriot and had his suspicions that these new sons of France might have the perfidy to break faith and leave the train at some place other than Marseilles. He therefore kept a sharp look-out--occupying a good strategic position right in front of our car--whenever the train stopped at stations. The thing would have been impossible, anyway; with that ticket one could never have passed the platform barriers. Said Herr von Rader: "They know all about their business. We are just little flies, don't you see, sonny, and this fine invention of a ticket is the thread wound about our little legs. We're prisoners, brother mine!" When we left the train at Marseilles, we saw our patriotic conductor run along the platform, signalling excitedly to a sergeant at the gate. "I've got them! Here they are!" was the meaning of this human semaphore. The conductor was a taxpayer and took good care that France should receive her dues. The sergeant and a corporal received us lovingly. The corporal took charge and marched us through the town, while the sergeant trotted along the sidewalk at a respectful distance. Without doubt he had no desire that any one should connect him with us. He was quite right. We did not look pretty and the night on the train had not enhanced what little beauty we may originally have possessed. Along the immense water-front of the port of Marseilles we marched; in the midst of a swarming throng of men, amongst a cosmopolitan human machine in full working blast. Past Arabs carrying heavy burdens and fat Levantines lazily strolling about, surrounded by Frenchmen of the south, always gesticulating, ever talking. Ship lay by ship. Elegant steam yachts were moored alongside of unkempt tramp-steamers, whose neglected appearance told of the troubles of money-making on the high seas. There were Levantine barques with funny round sails, whose crews were dressed in flannel shirts of two exclusive colours: a screaming red and a howling blue. Sailing-ships of some hundred different rigs lay there in line, enormous elevators discharged their unceasing flow of grain, and a colossal swivel bridge hung high in the air on her single pillar, seeming to defy all laws of gravitation. Casks, barrels, boxes, sacks went flying through the air, past our noses, shoved, pushed, thrown, bundled about, propelled by the heavy fists of men who apparently could not work without a tremendous amount of yelling and screaming. Surely the combined noises of fifteen large cities cannot equal the hellish babel of Marseilles' water-front.