“Do we take the railroad at Saverne?” I asked at last. “Is there a railroad there?”
“EVERY BRIDGE WAS GUARDED”
Buckhurst looked up at me. “It is rather strange that a French officer should not know the railroads in his own country,” he said.
I was silent. I was not the only officer whose shame was his ignorance of the country he had sworn to defend. Long before the war broke out, every German regimental officer, commissioned and non-commissioned, carried a better map of France than could be found in France itself. And the French government had issued to us a few wretched charts of Germany, badly printed, full of gross errors, one or two maps to a regiment, and a few scattered about among the corps headquarters—among officers who did not even know the general topography of their own side of the Rhine.
“Is there a railroad at Saverne?” I repeated, sullenly.
“You will take a train at Strasbourg,” replied Buckhurst.
“And then?”