Now I’m going to get some hot coffee, for it has turned cold, I think, and post this.  The one thing in life now that seems of desperate importance is to get to you.  Oh, little mother, the moment when I reach you!  It will be like getting to heaven, like getting at last, after many wanderings, and batterings, to the feet of God.

We ought to be at Waldshut, on the frontier, tomorrow morning, but nobody can say for certain, because we may be held up for hours anywhere on the way.

  Your Chris.

It’s a good thing being too tired to think.

  Wursburg, Thursday, August 6th, 1914, 4 p. m.

I’ve only got as far as this.  I was held up this time, not the train.  It went on without me.  Well, it doesn’t matter really; it only keeps me a little longer from you.

We stopped here about ten o’clock this morning, and I was so tired and stiff after the long night wedged in tight in the railway carriage that I got out to get some air and unstiffen myself, instinctively clutching my fiddle-case; and a Bavarian officer on the platform, watching the train with some soldiers, saw me and came over to me at once and demanded to see my papers.

“You are English,” he said; and when I said I was American he made a sound like Tcha.

I can’t tell you how horrid he was.  He kept me standing for two hours in the blazing sun.  You can imagine what I felt like when I saw my train going away without me.  I asked if I mightn’t go into the shade, into the waiting-room, anywhere out of the terrible sun, for I was positively dripping after the first half hour of it, and his answer to that and to anything else I said in protest was always the same:  “Krieg ist Krieg.  Mund halten.”

There was no reason why I shouldn’t be in the shade, except that he had power to prevent it.  Well, he was very young, and I don’t suppose had ever had so much power before, so I suppose it was natural, he being German.  But it was a most ridiculous position.  I tried to see it from that side and be amused, but I wasn’t amused.  While he went and telephoned to his superiors for instructions he put a soldier to guard me, and of course the people waiting on the platform for trains crowded to look.  They decided that I was no doubt a spy, and certainly and manifestly one of the swinish English, they said.  I wished then I couldn’t understand German.  I stood there doing my best to think it was all very funny, but I was too tired to succeed, and hadn’t had any breakfast, and they were too rude.  Then I tried to think it was just a silly dream, and that I had really got to Glion, and would wake up in a minute in a cool bedroom with the light coming through green shutters, and there’d be the lake, and the mountains opposite with snow on them, and you, my blessed, blessed little mother, calling me to breakfast.  But it was too hot and distinct and horribly consistent to be a dream.  And my clothes were getting wetter and wetter with the heat, and sticking to me.