The _Schnellzug_ was a real express; the ride like that from Albany to New York. Now and then we crossed the winding Moselle, the steep, plump hills of which were planted to their precipitous crests with orderly vineyards, each vine carefully tied to its stalk. For mile after mile the hills were terraced, eight-foot walls of cut stone holding up four-foot patches of earth, paths for the workers snaking upward between them. The system was almost exactly that of the Peruvians under the Incas, far apart as they were, in time and place, from the German peasant. The two civilizations could scarcely have compared notes, yet this was not the only similarity between them. But then, hunger and over-population breed stern necessity the world over, and with like necessity as with similar experience, it is no plagiarism to have worked out the problem in the same way. Between the vineyards, in stony clefts in the hills useless for cultivation, orderly towns were tucked away, clean little towns, still flecked with the snow of the night before. Even the French officers beside us marveled at the cleanliness of the towns _en Bochie_, and at the extraordinary physical comforts of Mainz—I mean Mayence—the headquarters of their area of occupation. Heavy American motor-trucks pounded by along the already dusty road beside us, alternating now and then with a captured German one, the Kaiser’s eagles still on its flanks, but driven by a nonchalant American doughboy, its steel tires making an uproar that could be plainly heard aboard the racing express. Long freight-trains rattled past in the opposite direction. With open-work wheels, stubby little cars stenciled “Posen,” “Essen,” “Breslau,” “Brüssel,” and the like, a half-dozen employees perched in the cubbyholes on the car ends at regular intervals, they were German from engine to lack of caboose—except that here and there a huge box-car lettered “U. S. A.” towered above its puny Boche fellows like a mounted guard beside a string of prisoners. There will still be a market for officers’ uniforms in Germany, though their military urge be completely emasculated. Even the brakemen of these freight-trains looked like lieutenants or captains; a major in appearance proved to be a station guard, a colonel sold tickets, and the station-master might easily have been mistaken for a _Feldmarschall_. Some were, in fact. For when the Yanks first occupied the region many of their commanders complained that German officers were not saluting them, as required by orders of the Army of Occupation. Investigation disclosed the harmless identity of the imposing “officers” in question. But the rule was amended to include any one in uniform; we could not be wasting our time to find out whether the wearer of a general’s shoulder-straps was the recent commander of the 4th Army Corps or the town-crier. So that now Allied officers were saluted by the police, the firemen, the mailmen—including the half-grown ones who carry special-delivery