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Updated: May 8, 2025
We marched on in silence for an hour or more until suddenly the front fours halted and all the others thronged up against them. We had reached our destination. There was a broad-gauge railway. On one side of it huge stacks of sleepers stretched away in long rows that were soon lost to sight in the wintry atmosphere. On the other side was a barbed wire fence.
Already on the Bagdad Railway the big tunnels of Taurus and Amanus are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be complete. To stop the mouths of the people, all political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior, for Prussia does not care for criticism.
"The A 1 double-action, back-spring, copper-fastened, broad-gauge telegraph line from here to the moon!" And away he ran to meet Kate, who was coming down the road. The mica-mine management appeared to be thoroughly in earnest about this extension of the telegraph line.
In the first place, the territory embraced in her sphere of influence is more important and contains two thirds the population. With Port Arthur in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line from Antung and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of Japan and through Korea to Manchuria without once getting into foreign waters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing better.
Once we reach the old stage route the chances of being scouted are few. Nobody uses that road since the broad-gauge reached Cragg's." Mrs. McFarlane could not rid herself of the resentment with which she suffered this enforced departure; but she had small opportunity to protest, for the wagon bumped and clattered over the stony stretches with a motion which confused as well as silenced her.
We returned to the station to unload our trucks, for at this point the broad-gauge line ceases, and there is but a narrow-gauge into the mountains. A band of Austrian prisoners were detailed to help us, and they at once recognized us, and knew that we came from Vrntze.
Leaving my companions I went the following morning to Progreso to attend to the unlucky baggage. For variety, I took the broad-gauge road, but found little difference in the country through which we passed. The number of wind-mills was astonishing, and most of them were Chicago aeromotors. At one station a great crowd of pure indians got off and on the train.
I wish I could feel like that now. The feeling is not quite gone even now, and I have often since seen these great broad-gauge creatures moving alive to and fro like Ezekiel's wheel dream beside the platforms of Babylon with much of the same old delight. Still I never went back with them to the faded footpath. They are all faded now, these footpaths. The walnut trees are dead at home.
Only they who have seen with their own eyes or felt in their own bones! what a wrecked road, or a road worn to pieces by motor lorries, is really like, can appreciate what this means. And during 1918 alone, the Directorate of Railway Traffic built or repaired 2,340 miles of broad-gauge and 1,348 miles of narrow-gauge railway.
Sporadic efforts have hitherto been made for the proper treatment of this letter of the alphabet with individual success, especially with those who have been in England, or have known English men and women of the broad-gauge variety.
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