ht at one
of the soup kitchens along the tracks. They fed me lukewarm stew
and slabs of rye bread, then went on singing and arguing without
paying much attention to me. One bald-headed, stocky private told
the crowd the news that von Hindenburg had captured Warsaw. Later
a crowd of big brutes, apparently pretty drunk, swaggered down and
clapped me on the back with a 'Who are you, my friend?'

"'Amerikaner,' I explained, not thinking it necessary to mention the war
correspondent part. They set up a cheer, clapped me on the back,
and finally lifted me to their shoulders for a triumphal ride up and
down the railroad ties, all the time yelling out 'Amerikaner! Hurrah!
Amerikaner!'

"A few hundred years seemed the night we spent locked in that
box-car prison. A five-days' equinoctial storm had given way to the
coldest day of the autumn: our car, raw and dank as a dungeon, joggled
along endlessly until afternoon gave way to evening and evening to
chilly night. Hour after hour we looked out upon the rolling fields and
burnt farmhouses along the path where General von Emmich's army had
passed. As the moon crawled up over the rain-bathed foothills of the
Ourthe Mountains, the temperature dropped far below the freezing point.
For ages we lay awake braced against the cold. The soldier next me, who
had been through the fight at Maubeuge, coughed throughout the night--a
hollow, retching cough. "Tuberculosis," the Red Cross doctor told me,
although the fellow had got through his army tests all right.

Between two and four in the morning we stuck in the middle of a
tunnel of the northern Vosges Mountains, two hundred feet, perhaps,
beneath the surface of the ground. The sliding door on the left side of
our car was locked: on the other side jagged walls, dripping wet to the
touch, jutted so close that a thin man couldn't have walked between
them and the car. Everywhere pitch blackness, the blackness of the
tomb. The consumptive soldier pulled a candle from his kit, balanced
it in the straw, and over it warmed his hands. If that candle had
toppled over in the straw we wouldn't have had a rat's chance in the
fire. It was impossible to get out of our car or to communicate with
another except by tapping. The fellows in the next car must have
been considerably frightened, for after about an hour they began
yelling and pounding at the walls. All you could hear was a roaring
sound that caromed against the walls of the cavern