A locomotive was shunting, near enough to elbow us, and screaming full-lunged.  I saw Barque’s mouth, stoppered by the clamor of our huge neighbor, pronounce an oath, and I saw the other faces grimacing in deafened impotence, faces helmeted and chin-strapped, for we were sentries in the station.

“After you!” yelled Barque furiously, addressing the white-plumed whistle.  But the terrible mechanism continued more imperiously than ever to drive his words back in his throat.  When it ceased, and only its echo rang in our ears, the thread of the discourse was broken for ever, and Barque contented himself with the brief conclusion, “Oui.”

Then we looked around us.  We were lost in a sort of town.  Interminable strings of trucks, trains of forty to sixty carriages, were taking shape like rows of dark-fronted houses, low built, all alike, and divided by alleys.  Before us, alongside the collection of moving houses, was the main line, the limitless street where the white rails disappeared at both ends, swallowed up in distance.  Sections of trains and complete trains were staggering in great horizontal columns, leaving their places, then taking them again.  On every side one heard the regular hammering on the armored ground, piercing whistles, the ringing of warning bells, the solid metallic crash of the colossal cubes telescoping their steel stumps, with the counter-blows of chains and the rattle of the long carcases’ vertebrae.  On the ground floor of the building that arises in the middle of the station like a town ball, the hurried bell of telegraph and telephone was at work, punctuated by vocal noises.  All about on the dusty ground were the goods sheds, the low stores through whose doors one could dimly see the stacked interiors—­the pointsmen’s cabins, the bristling switches, the hydrants, the latticed iron posts whose wires ruled the sky like music-paper; here and there the signals, and rising naked over this flat and gloomy city, two steam cranes, like steeples.

Farther away, on waste ground and vacant sites in the environs of the labyrinth of platforms and buildings, military carts and lorries were standing idle, and rows of horses, drawn out farther than one could see.

“Talk about the job this is going to be!”—­“A whole army corps beginning to entrain this evening!”—­“Tiens, they’re coming now!”

A cloud which overspread a noisy vibration of wheels and the rumble of horses’ hoofs was coming near and getting bigger in the approach to the station formed by converging buildings.

“There are already some guns on board.”  On some flat trucks down there, between two long pyramidal dumps of chests, we saw indeed the outline of wheels, and some slender muzzles.  Ammunition wagons, guns and wheels were streaked and blotched with yellow, brown, and green.

“They’re camoufles. [note 1] Down there, there are even horses painted.  Look! spot that one, there, with the big feet as if he had trousers on.  Well, he was white, and they’ve slapped some paint on to change his color.”