_Vienna, Tuesday, January 12th._ Last night and today twenty-three long trains of German regular troops have passed through the Ivanka station on their way east. They were apparently going to the Roumanian frontier. A train will hold two battalions of infantry, two thousand men, or a battery of artillery with full equipment. These trains would, therefore, represent something like thirty thousand men, and more were all the time coming. My car, in which I was _en route_ from Budapest to Vienna, stopped at one station just opposite one of these military trains, which I thus had time to study. It contained a battery of German artillery and was a very long one, consisting of flat cars, freight cars, and one or more passenger coaches for the officers. The guns of the battery, with all the limbers and caissons, were placed on flat-cars, while some of the freight cars were used for equipment and ammunition and others for the soldiers. The doors of these latter were open and were boarded up to a height of eighteen inches to keep floor draughts off the men lying within. The cars were filled with clean straw, sprigs of which trailed out of the doorways. The soldiers, like all German soldiers that I have seen, were fat, healthy, happy, and cheerful, singing, waving hands and handkerchiefs to the responsive crowds on the platforms, and laughing and joking. They looked for all the world like big puppies hanging out of a box filled with straw. They were young men of Germany's best troops and had that certain bearing of confidence and efficiency which marks veterans. Their faces, albeit smooth and healthy, were not the faces of boys, although some of them were still boys in years. The guns and caissons at the first uncritical glance looked like junk, but a second look revealed the error. Their metal work was battered and their paint chipped off, but the wheels and running-gear and the long gray barrels were clean and spick and span.