In the light of this assumption, one can understand more clearly the reason for those short lines which, branching out from the German strategical railways that run parallel to the Russian frontier though some miles from it, are carried to the frontier and there suddenly stop. It was, presumably, from such terminal points as these that the laying of the military railways on Russian territory would begin.
As regards the type of railways to be employed and the preparations made in advance for supplying and constructing them, we have the testimony of Mr. Roy Norton, an American writer, who says in "The Man of Peace"—one of the "Oxford Pamphlets, 1914-15," published by the Oxford University Press:—
On February 14 of this year (1914) I was in Cologne, and blundered, where I had no business, into what I learned was a military-stores yard. Among other curious things were tiny locomotives loaded on flats which could be run off those cars by an ingenious contrivance of metals, or, as we call them in America, rails. Also there were other flats loaded with sections of tracks fastened on cup ties (sleepers that can be laid on the surface of the earth) and sections of miniature bridges on other flats. I saw how it was possible to lay a line of temporary railway, including bridges, almost anywhere in an incredibly short space of time, if one had the men.... Before I could conclude my examination I discovered that I was on verboten ground; but the official who directed me out told me that what I had seen were construction outfits.
Mr. Norton further quotes the following from a letter he had just received from a Hollander who was a refugee in Germany at the outbreak of the war, and reached home on August 30, 1914:—
Never, I believe, did a country so thoroughly get ready for war. I saw the oddest spectacle, the building of a railway behind a battle-field. They had diminutive little engines and rails in sections, so that they could be bolted together, and even bridges that could be put across ravines in a twinkling. Flat cars that could be carried by hand and dropped on the rails, great strings of them. Up to the nearest point of battle came, on the regular railway, this small one.... It seemed to me that hundreds of men had been trained for this task, for in but a few minutes that small portable train was buzzing backward and forward on its own small portable rails, distributing food and supplies.... I've an idea that in time of battle it would be possible for those sturdy little trains to shift troops to critical or endangered points at the rate of perhaps twenty miles an hour.... A portable railway for a battle-field struck me as coming about as close to making war by machinery as anything I have ever heard of.
One may thus reasonably conclude, in regard to the Russo-German frontier, (1) that the broader gauge of the Russian railways would itself offer no real obstacle to the German troops whenever the time came for their invading Russian territory; (2) that in this eventuality the Germans would be able, by reason of the preparations made by them in advance, to lay down along the ordinary Russian roads lines of military light railways already put together in complete sections of combined rails and sleepers, which sections would only require to be fastened the one to the other to be at once ready for use; and (3) that these portable military railways, to be built on Russian territory, were designed both to supplement and to render still more efficient Germany's network of strategical railways along her eastern frontier.
In southern Silesia many improvements in the rail communication with Austria were made in 1900-10. New connections were established with the frontier railways, offering alternative routes from interior points, while various lines which stopped short of the frontier were extended to it and linked up with Austrian lines on the other side.
In her relations with France, Germany's efforts to improve still further her rail communications to the eastern and north-eastern frontiers of that country have been continuous since the war of 1870-1, on which campaign she started with a great advantage over the French since she was able to concentrate her troops on those frontiers by nine different routes, namely, six in North Germany, and three in South Germany, whereas France herself had then only three available. The course adopted by Germany has been (1) to secure a larger number of routes to the French frontier, South Germany's three lines, for instance, being increased to six; (2) to provide double track, or to substitute double for single track, for lines leading to the frontier and having a strategical importance; (3) to construct lines which cross transversely those proceeding direct to the French frontiers, thus allowing of intercommunication and transfer of traffic from one to another; and (4) improvement of the interior network of lines, with a view to facilitating military transport services in time of war. "Altogether," says Joesten, "we have nineteen points at which our railways cross the Rhine, and sixteen double-track lines for the transport of our troops from east to west, as against the nine which were alone available for concentration in 1870."
While showing all this activity on the immediate frontiers of France, Germany was no less zealous in providing alternative routes for a fresh invasion of French territory, the adoption of this further policy being obviously inspired by the energy that France was herself showing in the strengthening of her north-east frontier against invasion.