The train _was_ hours late. All trains are hours late in overcrowded, overburdened France, with her long unrepaired lines of communication, her depleted railway personnel, her insufficient, war-worn rolling-stock, struggling to carry a traffic that her days of peace never attempted. It was mid-morning when we reached Nancy, though the time-table had promised—to the inexperienced few who still put faith in French _horaires_—to bring us there while it was yet night. Here the key that had protected us for more than twelve hours was found, or its counterpart produced, by the station-master. Upon our return from squandering the equivalent of a half-dollar in the station buffet for three inches of stale and gravelly war-bread smeared with something that might have been axle-grease mixed with the sweepings of a shoe-shop, and the privilege of washing it down with a black liquid that was called coffee for want of a specific name, the storm had broken. It was only by extraordinary luck, combined with strenuous physical exertion, that we manhandled our way through the horizon-blue maelstrom that had surged into every available corner, in brazen indifference to “staff” privileges, back to the places which a companion, volunteering for that service, had kept for us by dint of something little short of actual warfare. From the moment of crossing, not long after, the frontier between that was France in 1914 and German Lorraine things seemed to take on a new freedom of movement, an orderliness that had become almost a memory. The train was still the same, yet it lost no more time. With a subtle change in faces, garb, and architecture, plainly evident, though it is hard to say exactly in what it consisted, came a smoothness that had long been divorced from travel by train. There was a calmness in the air as we pulled into Metz soon after noon which recalled pre-war stations. The platforms were ample, at least until our train began to disgorge the incredible multitude that had somehow found existing-place upon it. The station gates gave exit quickly, though every traveler was compelled to show his permission for entering the city. The aspect of the place was still German. Along the platform were ranged those awe-inspiring beings whom the uninitiated among us took to be German generals or field-officers instead of mere railway employees; wherever the eye roamed some species of _Verboten_ gazed sternly upon us. But the iron hand had lost its grip. Partly for convenience sake, partly in retaliation for a closely circumscribed journey, years before, through the land of the Kaiser, I had descended from the train by a window. What horror such undisciplined barbarism would have evoked in those other years! Now the heavy faces under the pseudo-generals’ caps not only gave no grimace of protest, presaging sterner measures; not even a shadow of surprise flickered across them. The grim _Verboten_ signs remained