Stewart, after watching this marvel of organization for a moment, realized that, if any carriages were empty, it would be the ones at the end of the train, and quietly made his way thither. At last, in the rear coach, he came to a compartment in which sat one man, evidently a German, with a melancholy bearded face. Before the door stood a guard watching the battalion entrain. "May one get aboard?" Stewart inquired, in his best German. The guard held up his hand for an instant; then the gold-braided station-master shouted a sentence which Stewart could not distinguish; but the guard dropped his hand and nodded. Looking back, the American saw a wild mob charging down the platform toward him, and hastily swung himself aboard. As he dropped into his seat, he could hear the shrieks and oaths of the mêlée outside, and the next moment, a party of breathless and disheveled women were storming the door. They were panting, exhausted, inarticulate with rage and chagrin; they fell in, rolled in, stumbled in, until the compartment was jammed. Stewart, swept from his seat at the first impact, but rallying and doing what he could to bring order out of chaos, could not but admire the manner in which his bearded fellow-passenger clung immovably to his seat until the last woman was aboard, and then reached quickly out, slammed shut the door, and held it shut, despite the entreaties of the lost souls who drifted despairingly past along the platform, seemingly blind, deaf, and totally uninterested in what was passing around him. Then Stewart looked at the women. Nine were crowded into the seats; eight were standing; all were red and perspiring; and most of them had plainly lost their tempers. Stewart was perspiring himself, and he got out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead; then he ventured to speak. "Well," he said; "so this is war! I have always heard it was warm work!" Most of the women merely glared at him and went on adjusting their clothing, and fastening up their hair, and straightening their hats; but one, a buxom woman of forty-eight or fifty, who was crowded next to him, and who had evidently suffered more than her share of the general misfortune, turned sharply. "Are you an American?" she demanded. "I am, madam." "And you stand by and see your countrywomen treated in this perfectly outrageous fashion?" "My dear madam," protested Stewart, "what could one man--even an American--do against a thousand?" "You could at least----" "Nonsense, mother," broke in another voice, and Stewart turned to see that it was a slim, pale girl of perhaps twenty-two who spoke. "The gentleman is quite right. Besides, I thought it rather good fun." "Good fun!" snapped her mother. "Good fun to be jerked about and trampled on and insulted! And where is our baggage? Will we ever see it again?" "Oh, the baggage is safe enough," Stewart assured her. "The troops will detrain somewhere this side the frontier, and we can all take our old seats."