What, in these circumstances, Germany evidently planned to do as soon as her troops crossed the frontier, in the event of a war with Russia, was to supplement the strategical lines on her own side of that frontier by military light railways which, laid on the ordinary roads, or on clearances to be effected, on Russian territory, would render her independent of the ordinary railways there, while offering the further advantage (1) that the laying of these narrow-gauge military lines--in rough and ready fashion, yet in a way that would answer the purposes of the moment--could be effected in shorter time than the gauge-conversion and the reconstruction of the Russian trunk lines would take; and (2) that these military railways could be built from any points along the frontier which were capable of being reached direct from the German strategical lines, and offered either an existing road or the opportunity of making one for the purpose. In the light of this assumption, one can understand more clearly the reason for those short lines which, branching out from the German strategical railways that run parallel to the Russian frontier though some miles from it, are carried to the frontier and there suddenly stop. It was, presumably, from such terminal points as these that the laying of the military railways on Russian territory would begin. As regards the type of railways to be employed and the preparations made in advance for supplying and constructing them, we have the testimony of Mr. Roy Norton, an American writer, who says in "The Man of Peace"--one of the "Oxford Pamphlets, 1914-15," published by the Oxford University Press:-- On February 14 of this year (1914) I was in Cologne, and blundered, where I had no business, into what I learned was a military-stores yard. Among other curious things were tiny locomotives loaded on flats which could be run off those cars by an ingenious contrivance of metals, or, as we call them in America, rails. Also there were other flats loaded with sections of tracks fastened on cup ties (sleepers that can be laid on the surface of the earth) and sections of miniature bridges on other flats. I saw how it was possible to lay a line of temporary railway, including bridges, almost anywhere in an incredibly short space of time, if one had the men.... Before I could conclude my examination I discovered that I was on _verboten_ ground; but the official who directed me out told me that what I had seen were construction outfits. Mr. Norton further quotes the following from a letter he had just received from a Hollander who was a refugee in Germany at the outbreak of the war, and reached home on August 30, 1914:--