The civilians composing our party were bidden to climb aboard the passenger coach, where the eight of us, two of the number being of augmented super-adult size, took possession of a compartment meant to hold six.  The other compartments were occupied by wounded Germans, except one compartment, which was set aside for the captive French lieutenant and two British subalterns.  Top-Sergeant Rosenthal was in charge of the train with headquarters aboard our coach.  With him, as aides, he had three Red Cross men.

The lighting apparatus of the car did not operate.  On the ledge of our window sat a small oil lamp, sending out a rich smell and a pale, puny illumination.  Just before we pulled out Rosenthal came and blew out the lamp, leaving the wick to smoke abominably.  He explained that he did this for our own well-being.  Belgian snipers just outside the town had been firing into the passing trains, he said, and a light in a car window was but an added temptation.  He advised us that if shooting started we should drop upon the floor.  We assured him in chorus that we would, and then after adding that we must not be surprised if the Belgians derailed the train during the night he went away, leaving us packed snugly in together in the dark.  This incident had a tendency to discourage light conversation among us for some minutes.

Possibly it was because daylight travel would be safer travel, or it may have been for some other good and sufficient reason, that after traveling some six or eight miles joltingly we stopped in the edge of a small village and stayed there until after sun-up.  That was a hard night for sleeping purposes.  One of our party, who was a small man, climbed up into the baggage net above one row of seats and stretched himself stiffly in the narrow hammock-like arrangement, fearing to move lest he tumble down on the heads of his fellow-sufferers.  Another laid him down in the little aisle flanking the compartment, where at least he might spraddle his limbs and where also, persons passing the length of the car stepped upon his face and figure from time to time.  This interfered with his rest.  The remaining six of us mortised ourselves into the seats in neck-cricking attitudes, with our legs so intertwined and mingled that when one man got up to stretch himself he had to use great care in picking out his own legs.  Sometimes he could only tell that it was his leg by pinching it.  This was especially so after inaction had put his extremities to sleep while the rest of him remained wide awake.

After dawn we ran slowly to Charleroi, the center of the Belgian iron industry, in a sterile land of mines and smelters and slag-heaps, and bleak, bare, ore-stained hillsides.  The Germans had fought here, first with organized troops of the Allies, and later, by their own telling, with bushwhacking civilians.  Whole rows of houses upon either side of the track had been ventilated by shells or burned out with fire,