“Nous sommes en Amerique!” she murmured.  The train jolted slowly on.  An hour or two after midnight it stopped and a strange figure in turban and white robe peered in.  “Complet!  Complet!” cried the lady with the little girls.  But the figure kept staring in, and, turning, chattered to others like him.  There was a crowd of them, men from France’s African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had been working in the French mines and were now going back to take the places of trained soldiers—­the daredevil “Turcos”—­sent north to fight the Germans.

They did not get into our compartment, but into the one next to it, and as there was no place to sit down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and after a time gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the floor.  They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and now and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song.  In Paris girls ran into the street and threw their arms about the brave “Marocs” as they marched by, but the lady with the little girls felt that they were a trifle smelly, and, fishing out a bottle of scent, she wet a handkerchief with it and passed it round.

The young Frenchman lit a match—­three-twenty.  The little boy, rousing from his corner, suddenly announced, apropos of nothing, that the Germans ought to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once came the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep apparently before this, warning him that he must not talk like that or the Germans might hear and shoot them.  We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one became aware that the gray light was not that of the moon.  The lady at my left sat upright.  “The day comes!” she said briskly.  It grew lighter.  We passed sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods—­the forest of St. Germain.  These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning, there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with the flaps pinned back.  Just such soldiers and scenes you have seen in the war pictures of Detaille and De Neuville.  Bridges, more houses, the rectangular grass-covered faces of forts at last; just as Paris was getting up for breakfast, into St. Lazare station, heaped with trunks and boiling with people, Parisians, belated American tourists, refugees from northeast villages, going somewhere, anywhere, to get away.  It was September 2.

There were miles of closed shops with placards on the shutters:  “Proprietor and personnel have been called to the colors”; no buses or trams, the few ’cabs piled with the luggage of those trying to get away, almost no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk.  Papers could not be cried aloud on the streets, and the only news was the official communique and a word about some Servian or Russian victory in some un-pronounceable region of the East.