the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we passed, gave a
stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said:
"Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as café
proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp
streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"




Chapter IX

The Road To Constantinople



Rumania and Bulgaria

The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day
rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up
through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania.

Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing there, Berlin and its
iron exaltation, slow-rumbling London--all the West and the war as we
had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the
earth. We were on the edge of the East now, rolling down into the
Balkans, into that tangle of races and revenges out of which the first
spark of the war was flung.

Since coffee that morning the lonely train had offered nothing more
nourishing than the endless Hungarian wheat-fields, with their rows of