“We surely will have our Kaiser back again, sooner or later,” cried the woman, in a tone like that of a religious fanatic.
Just then, however, the pair reached their station and there was no opportunity to get her to elaborate her text. They shook hands heartily, wished me a “_Glückliche Reise_,” and disappeared into the night.
Sunset and dusk had been followed by an almost full moon that made the evening only a fainter replica of the perfect cloudless day. Toward nine, however, the sky became overcast and the darkness impenetrable. This was soon the case inside as well as out, for during an unusually protracted stop at a small station a guard marched the length of the train, putting out all its lights. It seemed we were approaching the “danger zone.” I had been laboring under the delusion that the armistice which Germany had concluded with her enemies was in force on all fronts. Not at all. The Poles, it seemed, were intrenched from six hundred to three thousand yards away all along this section of the line. They had been there since January, soon after the province of Posen had revolted against German rule. Almost every night they fired upon the trains, now and then even with artillery. Sometimes the line was impassable. German troops, of course, were facing them. Trench raids were of almost nightly occurrence; some of them had developed into real battles.
Now and again as we hurled on through the night there were sounds of distant firing. It was only at Nakel, however, that we seemed in any personal danger. There the Poles were barely six hundred yards away, and between the time we halted at the station and got under way again at least a hundred shots were fired, most of them the rat-a-tat of machine-guns and all of them so close at hand that we unconsciously ducked our heads. The train apparently escaped unscathed, however, and two stations farther on the guard lighted it up again, with the announcement that danger was over. We rumbled on into Bromberg, where I descended toward midnight. Soldiers held the station gate and subjected every traveler—or, more exactly, his papers—to a careful scrutiny before permitting him to pass. My own credentials they accepted more readily than those of many of their fellow-countrymen, some of whom were herded into a place of detention. As I stepped out through the gate, another soldier thrust into my hand an _Ausweis_ permitting me to remain on the streets after dark, for Bromberg was officially in a state of siege.