in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of
an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor.
It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky,
and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far
behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out
of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape
were a Japanese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a
soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his
half-naked body. Over him stooped a nurse, improvising with delicate
ministries a hasty dressing. In the next carriage the black face of a
wounded Senegalese looked out, unearthly in the moonlight. Ahead of us
an interminable line of trains (some seventy of them I was told) had
passed, conveying fresh troops. Then I knew. The Germans, hovering like
a dark cloud some twenty miles away, had been reinforced, and a fierce
battle was in progress. The news of it had travelled by some mysterious
telepathy to every village along the line, and at every crossing groups
of pale-faced women, silent and intent, kept a restless vigil. They
looked like ghosts in the moonlight; no cheer escaped them as we passed,
no hand waved an exuberant greeting. In the twilight we had already seen
red-trousered soldiers, vivid as poppies against the grass, digging
trenches along the line, and at one point a group of sappers improvising
a wire footbridge across the river. The contagion of suspense was in the
air,--you seemed to catch it in the faint susurrus of the poplars.

"Shall we get to Calais?" I asked.

"Bon Dieu! I know not," was the reply of the harassed guard.

We pursued our stealthy journey, reached Abbeville somewhere about
midnight, and Boulogne in the small hours. 4 A.M. Calais at last! I
joyfully exclaimed. But between Calais Ville and Calais Maritime a group
of officers boarded our train and, for some mysterious reason, we were
headed off to Dunkirk. It grew colder and more cold, and I had had no
food since noon of yesterday. But my thoughts were with our men, the men
whom I had lately come to know, now lying out on the bare earth in the
moonlit trenches, keeping their everlasting vigil and blowing on their
fingers numbed with cold. We reached Dunkirk at 6 A.M. No explanation
why the train had played truant at Calais was vouchsafed me, nor was any
hope held out of a return. In those days I was travelling as a p