It was getting late in the afternoon and the fifth train to pull in from the south since our advent on the spot—­or possibly it was the sixth—­ had just halted when, from the opposite direction, a troop-train, long and heavy, panted into sight and stopped on the far track while the men aboard it got an early supper of hot victuals.  We crossed over to have a look at the new arrivals.

It was a long train, drawn by one locomotive and shoved by another, and it included in its length a string of flat cars upon which were lashed many field pieces, and commandeered automobiles, and even some family carriages, not to mention baggage wagons and cook wagons and supply wagons.  For a wonder, the coaches in which the troops rode were new, smart coaches, seemingly just out of the builders’ hands.  They were mainly first and second class coaches, varnished outside and equipped with upholstered compartments where the troopers took their luxurious ease.  Following the German fashion, the soldiers had decorated each car with field flowers and sheaves of wheat and boughs of trees, and even with long paper streamers of red and white and black.  Also, the artists and wags of the detachment had been busy with colored chalks.  There was displayed on one car a lively crayon picture of a very fierce, two-tailed Bavarian lion eating up his enemies—­a nation at a bite.  Another car bore a menu: 

Russian caviar

Servian rice meat English roast beef

Belgian ragout French pastry

Upon this same car was lettered a bit of crude verse, which, as we had come to know, was a favorite with the German private.  By my poor translation it ran somewhat as follows: 

For the Slav, a kick we have,
And for the Jap a slap;
The Briton too—­we’ll beat him blue,
And knock the Frenchman flat.

Altogether the train had quite the holidaying air about it and the men who traveled on it had the same spirit too.  They were Bavarians—­all new troops, and nearly all young fellows.  Their accouterments were bright and their uniforms almost unsoiled, and I saw that each man carried in his right boot top the long, ugly-looking dirk-knife that the Bavarian foot-soldier fancies.  The Germans always showed heat when they found a big service clasp-knife hung about a captured Englishman’s neck on a lanyard, calling it a barbarous weapon because of the length of the blade and long sharp brad-awl which folded into a slot at the back of the handle; but an equally grim bit of cutlery in a Bavarian’s bootleg seemed to them an entirely proper tool for a soldier to be carrying.

The troops—­there must have been a full battalion of them—­piled off the coaches to exercise their legs.  They skylarked about on the earth, and sang and danced, and were too full of coltish spirits to eat the rations that had been brought from the kitchen for their consumption.  Seeing our cameras, a lieutenant who spoke English came up to invite us to make a photograph of him and his men, with their bedecked car for a background.  He had been ill, he said, since the outbreak of hostilities, which explained why he was just now getting his first taste of active campaigning service.