and servants going to operate the railways toward the coast, more infantry, food trains, ammunition trains, train loads of railway tracks already bolted to metal ties and merely needing to be laid down and pieced together, and so on in endless succession all through France and through Belgium.  The two-track road, shaky in spots, especially when crossing rivers, is being worked to capacity, and how well the huge traffic is handled is surprising even to an American commuter.

Our fast train stops at the mouth of a tunnel, then crawls ahead charily, for the French, before retreating, dynamited the tunnel.  One track has been cleared, but the going is still bad.  To keep it from being blocked again by falling debris the Germans have dug clean through the top of the hill, opening up a deep well of light into the tunnel.  Looking up, you see a pioneer company in once cream-colored, now dirty-colored, fatigue uniform still digging away and terracing the sides of the big hole to prevent slides.  Half an hour later we go slow again in crossing a new wooden bridge over the Meuse—­only one track as yet.  It took the German pioneers nearly a week to build the substitute for the old steel railway bridge dynamited by the French, whose four spans lie buckled up in the river.  The pioneers are at work driving piles to carry a second track.  The process is interesting.  A forty-man-power pile driver is rigged upon the bow end of a French river barge with forty soldiers tugging at forty strands of the main rope.  The “gang” foreman, a Captain in field gray, stands on the river bank and bellows the word of command.  Up goes the heavy iron weight; another command, and down it drops on the pile.  It looks like a painfully slow process, but the bridges are rebuilt just the same.

Further on, a variety of interest is furnished to a squad of French prisoners being marched along the road.  Then a spot of ant-hill-like activity where a German railway company is at work building a new branch line, hundreds of them having pickaxes and making the dirt fly.  You half expect to see a swearing Irish foreman.  It looks like home—­all except the inevitable officer (distinguished by revolver and field glass) shouting commands.

The intense activity of the Germans in rebuilding the torn-up railroads and pushing ahead new strategic lines, is one of the most interesting features of a tour now in France.  I was told that they had pushed the railroad work so far that they were able to ship men and ammunition almost up to the fortified trenches.  The Germanization of the railroads here has been completed by the importation of station Superintendents, station hands, track walkers, &c., from the Fatherland.  The stretch over which we are traveling, for example, is in charge of Bavarians.  The Bavarian and German flags hang out at every French station we pass.  German signs everywhere, even German time.  It looks as if they thought to stay forever.