African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had been working in the
French mines and were now going back to take the places of trained
soldiers--the daredevil "Turcos"--sent north to fight the Germans.

They did not get into our compartment, but into the one next to it, and
as there was no place to sit down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and
after a time gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the
floor. They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and
now and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song. In Paris girls
ran into the street and threw their arms about the brave "Marocs" as
they marched by, but the lady with the little girls felt that they were
a trifle smelly, and, fishing out a bottle of scent, she wet a
handkerchief with it and passed it round.

The young Frenchman lit a match--three-twenty. The little boy, rousing
from his corner, suddenly announced, apropos of nothing, that the
Germans ought to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once came
the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep apparently before
this, warning him that he must not talk like that or the Germans might
hear and shoot them. We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one became
aware that the gray light was not that of the moon. The lady at my left
sat upright. "The day comes!" she said briskly. It grew lighter. We
passed sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods--the forest
of St. Germain. These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning,
there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside
these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with
the flaps pinned back. Just such soldiers and scenes you have seen in
the war pictures of Detaille and De Neuville. Bridges, more houses, the
rectangular grass-covered faces of forts at last; just as Paris was
getting up for breakfast, into St. Lazare station, heaped with trunks