reat
bundles of firewood. The country was almost all cultivated land, one
vast farming industry. And they had managed to get through the whole
year's work exactly as if the men were there. As far as we could see
every field was ploughed, every green crop springing. It is a wonderful
performance.

We had not the least idea where we were going until in the end we
actually got there. Travelling in France is quite different from
travelling in Egypt or England. In Egypt you still exercise your brain
as to which train you shall travel by and where you will stay and where
you will change. But in France there is no need for you to think out
your own journey--it is useless for you to do so. The moment you reach
France the big hand of General Headquarters takes hold of you; and from
that instant it picks you up and puts you down as if you were a pawn on
a chessboard. Whatever the railway station, there is always a big
British policeman. The policeman directs you to the Railway Transport
Officer and the Railway Transport Officer tells you how long you will
stay and when you will leave and where you will go to next. And when you
get to the next place there is another policeman who sends you to
another Railway Transport Officer; until you finally come to a policeman
who directs you from the station and up the street of a little French
town, where, standing on the wet cobbles at the corner of the old city
square, under dripping stage scenery gables, you find another British
policeman who passes you to another policeman at another corner who
directs you under the very archway and into the very office which you
are intended by General Headquarters to reach.

And if you go on right up to the very trenches themselves you will find
that British policeman all the way; directing the traffic at every
country cross-road where there is likely to be a congestion of the great
lumbering motor-lorries; standing outside the ruined village church
which the long-range guns have knocked to pieces in trying to get at a
supply dump or a headquarters; waiting at the fork-roads where you
finally have to leave your motor-car and walk only in small parties if
you wish to avoid sudden death; on point duty at the ruined farmhouses
which it is unhealthy at certain hours of the day to pass. At the corner
where you finally turn off the road into the long, deepening
communication trench; even at the point where the second line trenches
cross the communication t