The truth had failed and so had the half-truth.  To the next forbidding guard Marie came as a Red Cross nurse, hurrying to her station.

“Your uniform, Madame,” he interposed.

“No time to get a uniform; no time to get a permission,” she explained.

“Take time, Madame,” was his brusque dismissal.

Each time rebuffed, she tried again, but against the full battery of her blandishments the line was adamant.

“It’s no use,” I said.  “We may as well go home.”

“No retreat until we’ve tried our last reserves,” she responded, clinking some coins together in her hand.  “We’ll try a change of tactics.”

We reconnoitered and decided that an opening might be made through guardian number two.  He had almost surrendered in the first engagement.  This time, along with the smile, she flashed a coin.  Perchance he had already repented of his first refusal.  Anyhow, if an officer of France could be made happy with his sweetheart and at the same time a brave gendarme could be made richer by a five-franc piece, would not La Belle France fight so much the better?  The logic was incontestable.  “This way, Mademoiselle, Monsieur, and be quick, please.”

We had passed through the lines into a riot of red and blue uniforms.  Soldiers were everywhere sprawled over the platforms, knotted up in sleep, yawning, stretching their limbs, eating, smoking and swearing.  No one knew anything about tickets, trains or aught else.

Swirled about in an eddying tide of entraining troops, we were flung up against a stationary being garbed as a railway dispatcher.  He bluffed and blustered a bit.  Our story, however, supplemented by some hard cash, procured calm and presently we found ourselves in a compartment with two tickets marked Melun, a few rations and sundry admonitions not to converse with fellow-passengers until the train started.

It is hard to explain why any one should want to communicate in German to an American girl in a French railway compartment in wartime.  But explain why some people want to play with trip-hammers and loaded guns.  We know they do.  And so, though aware that there were spy-hunting listeners all around, a mad desire to utter the forbidden tongue obsessed me.  Wry faces from Marie, emphasized by repeated pinches at each threatened outbreak, brought me back to my senses and to Anglo-Saxon.

Not only one who spoke, but even one who understood the hated tongue was a suspect.  For the least knowledge of the enemy’s language was to some the hall-mark of a spy.  The game played throughout France and Belgium was to fling a sudden command at the suspect, catching the unwary fellow off-guard, and thus trap him into self-betrayal.

An official would say sharply:  “Nehmen Sie ihre Hutte ab” (Take off your hat).  Or there would come a sudden challenge on the street, “Wohin gehen Sie?” (Where are you going?) If instinctively one obeyed or replied in German, he was there caught with the goods.