Here on a siding we lay all day, grilled in the heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger vermin, while troop trains without number passed us, hurrying along the sentry-guarded railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium.

Every box-car door made a frame for a group-picture of broad German faces and bulky German bodies.
Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers had lashed limbs of trees and big clumps of field flowers.

Also with colored chalks they had extensively frescoed the wooden walls as high up as they could reach.
The commonest legend was "On to Paris," or for variety "To Paris Direct," but occasionally a lighter touch showed itself.

For example, one wag had inscribed on a car door: "Declarations of War Received Here," and another had drawn a highly impressionistic likeness of his Kaiser, and under it had inscribed "Wilhelm II, Emperor of Europe." Presently as train after train, loaded sometimes with guns or supplies but usually with men, clanked by, it began to dawn upon us that these soldiers were of a different physical type from the soldiers we had seen heretofore.

They were all Germans, to be sure, but the men along the front were younger men, hard-bitten and trained down, with the face which we had begun to call the Teutonic fighting face, whereas these men were older, and of a heavier port and fuller fashion of countenance.
Also some of them wore blue coats, red-trimmed, instead of the dull gray service garb of the troops in the first invading columns.