at the real enthusiasm of Generals concerning the
qualities of the New Army was most moving--and enheartening.

The baths establishment was very British--much more British than
any of those operating it perhaps imagined. Such a phenomenon
could probably be seen on no other front. It had been contrived out
of a fairly large factory. It was in charge of a quite young subaltern,
no doubt anxious to go and fight, but condemned indefinitely to the
functions of baths-keeper. In addition to being a baths-keeper this
young subaltern was a laundry-manager; for when bathing the
soldiers left their underclothing and took fresh. The laundry was very
large; it employed numerous local women and girls at four francs a
day. It had huge hot drying-rooms where the women and girls
moved as though the temperature was sixty degrees instead of
being over a hundred. All these women and girls were beautiful, all
had charm, all were more or less ravishing--simply because for days
we had been living in a harsh masculine world--a world of motor-
lorries, razors, trousers, hob-nailed boots, maps, discipline, pure
reason, and excessively few mirrors. An interesting item of the
laundry was a glass-covered museum of lousy shirts, product of
prolonged trench-life in the earlier part of the war, and held by
experts to surpass all records of the kind!

The baths themselves were huge and simple--a series of gigantic
steaming vats in which possibly a dozen men lathered themselves
at once. Here was fighting humanity; you could see it in every
gesture. The bathers, indeed, appeared to be more numerous than
they in fact were. Two hundred and fifty could undress, bathe, and
re-clothe themselves in an hour, and twelve hundred in a morning.
Each man of course would be free to take as many unofficial baths,
in tin receptacles and so on, as he could privately arrange for and
as he felt inclined for. Companies of dirty men marching to the
baths, and companies of conceitedly clean men marching from the
baths, helped to strengthen the ever-growing suspicion that a great
Army must be hidden somewhere in the neighbourhood.

Nevertheless, I still saw not the ultimate destination of all those
streams of supply which I have described.

I had, however, noted a stream in the contrary direction--that is,
westwards and southwards towards the Channel and England. You
can first trace the beginnings of this stream under the sound of the
guns (which you never see). A stretc