At the train-gate those in uniform, who had not been called upon to stand in line for hours, if not for days, to get passports, to have them stamped and visaed, to fulfil a score of formalities that must have made the life of a civilian without official backing not unlike that of a stray cur in old-time Constantinople, were again specially favored. Once on the platform—but, alas! there was no escaping the crush and goal-less helter-skelter of the half-anarchy that had befallen the railway system of France in the last supreme lunge of the war. The Nancy-Metz express—the name still seemed strange, long after the signing of the armistice—had already been taken by storm. What shall it gain a man to have formed queue and paid his franc days before for a reserved _place_ if the corridors leading to it are so packed and crammed with pillar-like _poilus_, laden with equipment enough to stock a hardware-store, with pack-and-rifle-bearing American doughboys, with the few lucky civilians who reached the gates early enough to worm their way into the interstices left, that nothing short of machine-gun or trench-mortar can clear him an entrance to it? Wise, however, is the man who uses his head rather than his shoulders, even in so unintellectual a matter as boarding a train. About a parlor-coach, defended by gendarmes, lounged a half-dozen American officers with that casual, self-satisfied air of those who “know the ropes” and are therefore able to bide their time in peace. A constant stream of harried, disheveled, bundle-laden, would-be passengers swept down upon the parlor-car entrance, only to be politely but forcibly balked in their design by the guardsmen with an oily, “Reserved for the French Staff.” Thus is disorder wont to breed intrigue. The platform clock had raised its hands to strike the hour of departure when the lieutenant who had offered to share his previous experience with me sidled cautiously up to a gendarme and breathed in his ear something that ended with “American Secret Service.” The words themselves produced little more effect than there was truth in the whispered assertion. But the crisp new five-franc note deftly transferred from lieutenant to gendarme brought as quick results as could the whisper of “bakshish” in an Arab ear. We sprang lightly up the guarded steps and along a corridor as clear of humanity as No Man’s Land on a sunny noonday. Give the French another year of war, with a few more millions of money-sowing Allies scattered through the length and breadth of their fair land, and the back-handed slip of a coin may become as universal an open sesame as in the most tourist-haunted corner of Naples.