On February 10, Labouchere took his departure from Paris, feeling, as he said, much as Daniel must have done on emerging from the den of lions. Baron Rothschild procured for him a pass which enabled him to take the Amiens train at the goods station within the walls of the city, instead of driving, as those who were less fortunate were obliged to do, to Gonesse. The train was drawn up before a shed in the midst of oceans of mud. It consisted of one passenger carriage, and of a long series of empty bullock vans. He entered one of the latter as the passenger van was already crowded. At Breteuil the train waited for above an hour, and Labouchere, impatient of the delay, perceiving a Prussian train puffing up, managed to induce an official to allow him to get into the luggage van, by which means he was able to proceed on his way to the destination. "Having started from Paris as a bullock, I reached Amiens at twelve o'clock as a carpet-bag," was the way he described his journey. {141} At Abbeville the train passed out of the Prussian lines into the French, and Calais was reached at 7 P.M. "Right glad" was the Paris correspondent, to use his own words, to "eat a Calais supper and to sleep on a Calais bed."[15] In his last letter to the _Daily News_ during the war, Mr. Labouchere lodged one other Parthian shot in the city whose hospitality he had been enjoying: "I took my departure from Paris," he wrote, "leaving without any very poignant regret, its inhabitants wending their way to the electoral 'urns,' the many revolving in their minds how France and Paris are to manage to pay the little bill which their creditor outside is making up against them; the few--the very few--determined to die rather than yield, sitting in the cafés on the boulevard, which is to be, I presume, their last ditch." In one of his earliest numbers of _Truth_, Mr. Labouchere gave a characteristic account of how he behaved under fire. It is worth quoting as illustrative of the naïve frankness with which he always described those instinctive little actions of human nature which more sophisticated persons usually pretend never occur. "I was at some of the engagements during the Franco-Prussian War. The first time that I was under fire, I felt that every shell whizzing through the air would infallibly blow me up. Being a non-combatant, in an unconcerned sort of way, as if I had business to attend to elsewhere, I effected a strategical movement to the rear. But, as no shell had blown me up, I came to the conclusion that no shell would blow me up, and accepted afterwards as a natural state of things which did not concern me, the fact that these missiles occasionally blew up other people." [1] _Times_, January 17, 1912. [2] _Truth_, January 24, 1912.