“I guess I’ll never come to this Europe again!” said an American lady who had been waiting for five hours in a side street in Paris for this ordeal.  “It’s a cruel shame to treat American citizens as though they were thieves and rogues.  I wonder the President of the United States don’t make a protest about it.  Are people here so ignorant they don’t even know the name of Josiah K. Schultz, of Boston, Massachusetts?”

The commissary’s clerk inside the building was quite unmoved by the name of Josiah K. Schultz, of Boston, Massachusetts.  It held no magic for him, and he seemed to think that the lady-wife of that distinguished man might be a German spy with American papers.  He kept her waiting, deliberately, though she had waited for five hours in the street outside.

8

The railway time-tables ceased to have a meaning after the first hour of mobilization.  Bradshaw became a lie and civil passengers were only allowed on the rare trains which ran without notice at any hour of the day or night, at the discretion of military officers, according to the temporary freedom of the line from troop trains and supply trains.  Those tourist crowds suffered intolerable things, which I shared with them, though I was a different kind of traveller.  I remember one such scene at Dijon, typical of many others.  Because only one train was starting on that day to the capital, and the time of it was utterly unknown to the railway officials, three or four hundred people had to wait hour after hour, for half a night, penned up in a waiting-room, which became foul with the breath and heat of so many people.  In vain did they appeal to be let out on to the platform where there would be more air and space.  A sentry with fixed bayonet stood with his back to them and barred the way.  Old ladies sat down in despair on their baggage, wedged between legs straddled across their bags.  A delicate woman near me swooned in the stifling atmosphere.  I had watched her grow whiter and whiter and heard the faintness of her sighs, so that when she swayed I grasped her by the arm and held her up until her husband relieved me of her weight.  A Frenchwoman had a baby at her breast.  It cried with an unceasing wail.  Other babies were crying; and young girls, with sensitive nerves, were exasperated by this wailing misery and the sickening smell which pervaded this closed room.

When the train came in, the door was opened and there was a wild rush for the carriages, without the English watchword of “women and children first.”  Thrust on one side by sharp elbows, I and my two friends struggled at last into the corridor, and for nineteen hours sat there on the sharp edges of our upturned trunks, fixed rigidly between the bodies of other travellers.  To the left of us was a French peasant, a big, quiet man, with a bovine gift of patience and utterly taciturn.  After the first five minutes I suspected that somewhere concealed about his person was a ripe cheese.  There was a real terror in