On the way to Pfetterhausen we were challenged several times by sentries posted at different barriers on the road. At each stop the car slowed down and was pulled up, the officer sitting next the driver got down and opened the slide of his lantern—the night was pitch dark, with only a thin crescent moon high up in the cloudy sky—gave the word, advanced to the barrier, showed our papers, and finally turned the lantern in our direction to show that we might come on. Once or twice he must have found the pauses before the sentries would let him walk up to the muzzles of their loaded and levelled rifles uncomfortably long. We were cutting across the narrow strip of French territory which lies between Montreux Vieux and Pfetterhausen, and their lonely posts were quite close enough to the frontier to make the question of dealing with an unknown motor, arriving suddenly in the dead of night, rather a nervous problem. They could not know for certain, till they had examined the permits—even the Acting-Brigadier had to have one—whether we were friends or foes, and to fire first and inquire afterwards might have seemed to them the better part of discretion if not of valour. That did happen more than once to harmless travellers like ourselves while we were driving about Belgium, where the sturdy patriots of the _troisième ban_, who guarded the barriers with ancient weapons that looked as if they had been dug up on the field of Waterloo, were a real terror by night. But these sentries were disciplined French soldiers, not ignorant Wallachian peasants, and gave one quite a pleasant feeling of security—once we had passed them. No German scouts were likely to be prowling about within, at any rate, a mile or two of their posts.