We left after ten, of a black night. Our return trip, by direct route, took us through a strip of neutral territory. We were startled some eight or ten times by a stentorian “_Halte!_” at improvised wooden barriers, in lonely places, by soldiers in French uniforms who were not Frenchmen, and who could neither speak any tongue we could muster nor read our pass. They were French colonials, many of them blacker than the night in which they kept their shivering vigil. Most of them delayed us a matter of several minutes; all of them carried aside their clumsy barriers and let us pass at last with bad grace. Nearing Coblenz, we were halted twice by our own soldiers, stationed in pairs beside their blazing fires, and at three in the morning we scattered to our billets. Two cartoons always come to mind when I look back on those months with the American Watch on the Rhine. One is French. It shows two _poilus_ sitting on the bank of the famous stream, the one languidly fishing, with that placid indifference of the French fisherman as to whether or not he ever catches anything; the other stretched at three-fourths length against a wall and yawning with ennui as he remarks, “And they call this the Army of _Occupation_!” The other drawing is American. It shows Pershing in 1950. He is bald, with a snowy beard reaching to his still soldierly waist, while on his lap he holds a grandson to whom he has been telling stories of his great years. Suddenly, as the erstwhile commander of the A. E. F. is about to doze off into his afternoon nap, the grandson points a finger at the map, demanding, “And what is that red spot in the center of Europe, grandpa?” With one brief glance the old general springs to his feet, crying, “Great Cæsar! I forgot to relieve the Army of Occupation!”