Nearing Rheims we turned into a splendid straight highway bordered by trees, where the late afternoon sunlight filtered through the dead leaves, which still hung from the boughs and dappled the yellow road with black splotches, until it made you think of jaguar pelts.  Midway of our course here we met troops moving toward us in force.  First, as usual, came scouts on bicycles and motorcycles.  One young chap had woven sheaves of dahlias and red peonies into the frame of his wheel, and through the clump of quivering blossoms the barrel of his rifle showed, like a black snake in a bouquet.  He told us that troops were coming behind, going to the extreme right wing—­a good many thousands of troops, he thought.  Ordinarily Uhlans would have followed behind the bicycle men, but this time a regiment of Brunswick Hussars formed the advance guard, riding four abreast and making a fine show, what with their laced gray jackets and their lanes of nodding lances, and their tall woolly busbies, each with its grinning brass death’s-head set into the front of it.

There was a blithe young officer who insisted on wheeling out of the line and halting us, and passing the time of day with us.  I imagine he wanted to exercise his small stock of English words.  Well, it needed the exercise.  The skull-and-bones poison label on his cap made a wondrous contrast with the smiling eyes and the long, humorous, wrinkled-up nose below it.

“A miserable country,” he said, with a sweep of his arm which comprehended all Northwestern Europe, from the German border to the sea —­“so little there is to eat!  My belly—­she is mostly empty always.  But on the yesterday I have the much great fortune.  I buy me a swine—­what you call him?—­a pork?  Ah, yes; a pig.  I buy me a pig.  He is a living pig; very noisy, as you say—­very loud.  I bring him twenty kilometers in an automobile, and all the time he struggle to be free; and he cry out all the time.  It is very droll—­not?—­me and the living pig, which ride, both together, twenty kilometers!”

We took some letters from him to his mother and sweetheart, to be mailed when we got back on German soil; and he spurred on, beaming back at us and waving his free hand over his head.

For half an hour or so, we, traveling rapidly, passed the column, which was made up of cavalry, artillery and baggage trains.  I suppose the infantry was going by another road.  The dragoons sang German marching songs as they rode by, but the artillerymen were dour and silent lot for the most part.  Repeatedly I noticed that the men who worked the big German guns were rarely so cheerful as the men who belonged to the other wings of the service; certainly it was true in this instance.

We halted two miles north of Rheims in the front line of the German works.  Here was a little shattered village; its name, I believe, was Brimont.  And here, also, commanding the road, stood a ruined fortress of an obsolete last-century pattern.  Shellfire had battered it into a gruel of shattered red masonry; but German officers were camped within its more habitable parts, and light guns were mounted in the moat.