Never, I believe, did a country so thoroughly get ready for war. I saw the oddest spectacle, the building of a railway behind a battle-field. They had diminutive little engines and rails in sections, so that they could be bolted together, and even bridges that could be put across ravines in a twinkling. Flat cars that could be carried by hand and dropped on the rails, great strings of them. Up to the nearest point of battle came, on the regular railway, this small one.... It seemed to me that hundreds of men had been trained for this task, for in but a few minutes that small portable train was buzzing backward and forward on its own small portable rails, distributing food and supplies.... I've an idea that in time of battle it would be possible for those sturdy little trains to shift troops to critical or endangered points at the rate of perhaps twenty miles an hour.... A portable railway for a battle-field struck me as coming about as close to making war by machinery as anything I have ever heard of. One may thus reasonably conclude, in regard to the Russo-German frontier, (1) that the broader gauge of the Russian railways would itself offer no real obstacle to the German troops whenever the time came for their invading Russian territory; (2) that in this eventuality the Germans would be able, by reason of the preparations made by them in advance, to lay down along the ordinary Russian roads lines of military light railways already put together in complete sections of combined rails and sleepers, which sections would only require to be fastened the one to the other to be at once ready for use; and (3) that these portable military railways, to be built on Russian territory, were designed both to supplement and to render still more efficient Germany's network of strategical railways along her eastern frontier. In _southern Silesia_ many improvements in the rail communication with Austria were made in 1900-10. New connections were established with the frontier railways, offering alternative routes from interior points, while various lines which stopped short of the frontier were extended to it and linked up with Austrian lines on the other side.