It was a sometime TIMES reader, a German brakeman, who had worked in New York and was proud of being able to speak “American,” who helped me to slip aboard the military postzug (post train) that left the important military centre of L——­ at 1:30 A.M. and started to crawl toward the front with a mixed cargo of snoring field chaplains, soldiers rejoining their units, officers with iron crosses pinned to their breasts, ambulance men who talked gruesome shop, fresh meat, surgical supplies, mail bags, &c.  Sometimes the train would spurt up to twelve miles an hour.  There were long stops at every station, while unshaven Landsturm men on guard scanned the car windows in search of spies by the light of their electric flash lamps.  After many hours somebody said we were now in Belgium.

There are no longer any bothersome customs formalities at the Belgian border, but the ghost of a house that had been knocked into a cocked hat by a shell indicated that we were in the land of the enemy.  Houses that looked as if they had been struck by a Western cyclone now became more numerous.  A village church steeple had a jagged hole clean through it.  After more hours somebody else said we were in France.  Every bridge, culvert, and crossroad was guarded by heavily bearded Landsturm men, who all looked alike in their funny, antiquated, high black leather helmets—­usually in twos—­the countryside dotted with cheery little watch fires.

In the little French villages all lights were out in the houses.  The streets were barred like railroad crossings except that the poles were painted in red-white-black stripes, a lantern hanging from the middle of the barrier to keep the many army automobiles that passed in the night from running amuck.

Sedan, a beehive of activity, was reached at daybreak.  Here most of the military, plus the Field Chaplains, got out.  From here on daylight showed the picturesque ruin the French themselves had wrought—­the frequent tangled wreckage of dynamited steel railway bridges sticking out of the waters of the river, piles of shattered masonry damming the current, here and there half an arch still standing of a once beautiful stone footbridge.  I was told that over two hundred bridges had been blown up by the retreating French in their hopeless attempt to delay the German advance in this part of France alone.

Several hours more of creeping over improvised wooden bridges and restored roadbeds brought the post train to the French city that had 20,000 inhabitants before the war which the Kaiser and the Great Headquarters now occupy.

Wooden signs printed in black letters, “Verboten,” (forbidden,) now ornament the pretty little park, with its fountain still playing, outside the railroad station.  The paths are guarded by picked grenadiers, not Landsturm men this time, while an officer of the guard makes his ceaseless rounds.  Opposite the railroad station, on the other side of the little park, is an unpretentious villa of red brick and terra