ominous, experience. Entering the Kaiser's
dominions by the route from the town of Luxemburg to Treves, one came
of a sudden upon a colossal detraining station that was not quite
completed, fulfilling no conceivable peaceful object and dumped down
on the very frontier--anything more barefaced it would be difficult to
conceive. Treves itself, three or four miles on, constituted a vast
railway centre, and three miles or so yet farther along there was its
counterpart in another great railway centre where there was no town at
all. You got Euston, Liverpool Street, and Waterloo--only the lines
and sidings, of course--grown up like mushrooms in a non-populous and
non-industrial region, and at the very gates of a little State of
which Germany had guaranteed the neutrality.

Traversing the region to the north of the Moselle along the western
German border-line, this proved to be a somewhat barren, partly
woodland, partly moorland, tract, sparsely inhabited as Radnor and
Strathspey; and yet this unproductive district had become a network of
railway communications. Elaborate detraining stations were passed
every few miles. One constantly came upon those costly overhead
cross-over places, where one set of lines is carried right over the
top of another set at a junction, so that continuous traffic going one
way shall not be checked by traffic coming in from the side and
proceeding in the opposite direction--a plan seldom adopted at our
most important railway centres. On one stretch of perhaps half-a-dozen
miles connecting two insignificant townships were to be seen eight
lines running parallel to each other. Twopenny-halfpenny little trains
doddered along, occasionally taking up or putting down a single
passenger at some halting-place that was large enough to serve a
Coventry or a Croydon. The slopes of the cuttings and sidings were
destitute of herbage; the bricks of the culverts and bridges showed
them by the colour to be brand-new; all this construction had taken
place within the previous half-dozen years. Everything seemed to be
absolutely ready except that one place on the Luxemburg frontier
mentioned above, and that obviously could be completed in a few hours
of smart work, if required.

One had heard a good deal about the Belgians having filled in a gap on
their side of the frontier so as to join up Malmedy with their internal
railway system, and thus to establish a fresh through-connection
between the Rhineland and the Me