It was long after dark when we got to Belfort. There was nowhere for us to sleep in the station, and no return train. Otherwise I think the little knot of officers who shook their heads doubtfully over our passports on the dimly lit platform would certainly have packed us into it straight away. There were some grounds for their hesitation. We had reached one of the chief of the gates of France, and were getting near the enemy. The Trouée de Belfort, the wide flat opening between the foothills of the Vosges and the Jura mountains, had to be defended from possible foes within as well as without. War, as the warrior with the fierce moustachios remarked to me a month or two later, is a serious matter, and nowhere were the French taking it more seriously than in the war-worn outpost fortress that stands sentinel in front of the Belfort gap, linked to the heart of the Republic by the long chain of lonely sentries that guarded the railway night and day all the way to Paris. Outside it very little was known at that time—in England nothing at all—of its then condition. Even the Germans knew nothing, so they, or their newspapers, invented lies about it, and said that it was closely invested. But though no German soldier, except in an aeroplane, ever got within miles of it, the state of siege proclaimed by the Governor was enforced with rigid strictness, and the whole of the civil population, except those who catered for the needs of the garrison, had been evacuated some days before we got there. At the best, therefore, however genuine our passports and however innocent our appearance, we were two _bouches inutiles_ who would have to be fed; at the worst, as journalists, the chances were that we should be indiscreet (that is the normal view); and anyhow it was very doubtful if we had any right to be there at all. But there, undeniably, we were, and so—well, perhaps after all the best way out of the difficulty was to send us to the Governor’s headquarters and leave him to deal with our case. So to the General’s quarters, the heart of the fortress, which we were as anxious as any German to reach, we set out, under the escort of Private Jouanard, election agent and newspaper correspondent, a convinced socialist and anti-militarist, but, like his idol Jaurès, a Frenchman first of all, and therefore an ardent soldier of France, a warm admirer of England, and a bitter enemy of the Boche and all his works.