id, dogged
cheeriness, sensed the tragedy of France. It was a land swept bare of all
its fine young manhood. There was no pleasant stir and bustle of civilian
life. Those who were left went about their work silently and joylessly.
When we asked of the men, we received, always, the same quiet, courteous
reply: "A la guerre, monsieur."

The boys soon learned the meaning of the phrase, "a la guerre." It became
a war-cry, a slogan. It was shouted back and forth from car to car and
from train to train. You can imagine how eager we all were; how we
strained our ears, whenever the train stopped, for the sound of the guns.
But not until the following morning, when we reached the little village
at the end of our railway journey, did we hear them, a low muttering like
the sound of thunder beyond the horizon. How we cheered at the first
faint sound which was to become so deafening, so terrible to us later! It
was music to us then; for we were like the others who had gone that way.
We knew nothing of war. We thought it must be something adventurous and
fine. Something to make the blood leap and the heart sing. We marched
through the village and down the poplar-lined road, surprised, almost
disappointed, to see the neat, well-kept houses, and the pleasant, level
fields, green with spring crops. We had expected that everything would be
in ruins. At this stage of the journey, however, we were still some
twenty-five miles from the firing-line.

During all the journey from the coast, we had seen, on every side,
evidences of that wonderfully organized branch of the British military
system, the Army Service Corps. From the village at which we detrained,
everything was English. Long lines of motor transport lorries were parked
along the sides of the roads. There were great ammunition bases,
commissariat supply depots, motor repair shops, wheel-wright and
blacksmith shops, where one saw none but khaki-clad soldiers engaged in
all the noncombatant business essential to the maintenance of large
armies. There were long lines of transport wagons loaded with supplies,
traveling field-kitchens, with chimneys smoking and kettles steaming as
they bumped over the cobbled roads, water carts, Red Cross carts, motor
ambulances, batteries of artillery, London omnibuses, painted slate gray,
filled with troops, seemingly endless columns of infantry on foot, all
moving with us, along parallel roads, toward the firing-line. And most of
these troops and sup