There was a blithe young officer who insisted on wheeling out of the line and halting us, and passing the time of day with us. I imagine he wanted to exercise his small stock of English words. Well, it needed the exercise. The skull-and-bones poison label on his cap made a wondrous contrast with the smiling eyes and the long, humorous, wrinkled-up nose below it. "A miserable country," he said, with a sweep of his arm which comprehended all Northwestern Europe, from the German border to the sea--"so little there is to eat! My belly--she is mostly empty always. But on the yesterday I have the much great fortune. I buy me a swine--what you call him?--a pork? Ah, yes; a pig. I buy me a pig. He is a living pig; very noisy, as you say--very loud. I bring him twenty kilometers in an automobile, and all the time he struggle to be free; and he cry out all the time. It is very droll--not?--me and the living pig, which ride, both together, twenty kilometers!" We took some letters from him to his mother and sweetheart, to be mailed when we got back on German soil; and he spurred on, beaming back at us and waving his free hand over his head. For half an hour or so, we, traveling rapidly, passed the column, which was made up of cavalry, artillery and baggage trains. I suppose the infantry was going by another road. The dragoons sang German marching songs as they rode by, but the artillerymen were a dour and silent lot for the most part. Repeatedly I noticed that the men who worked the big German guns were rarely so cheerful as the men who belonged to the other wings of the service; certainly it was true in this instance. We halted two miles north of Rheims in the front line of the German works. Here was a little shattered village; its name, I believe, was Brimont. And here, also, commanding the road, stood a ruined fortress of an obsolete last-century pattern. Shellfire had battered it into a gruel of shattered red masonry; but German officers were camped within its more habitable parts, and light guns were mounted in the moat. The trees thereabout had been mowed down by the French artillery from within the city, so that the highway was littered with their tops. Also, the explosives had dug big gouges in the earth. Wherever you looked you saw that the soil was full of small, raggedy craters. Shrapnel was dropping intermittently in the vicinity; therefore we left our cars behind the shelter of the ancient fort and proceeded cautiously afoot until we reached the frontmost trenches.