re being turned into abstractions, into
ideas, poetry, rhetoric--was this middle ground through which we were
now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.

We returned to Crepy. All that night the trains went clanking through
the station, pouring more men--Frenchmen, Englishmen--into the sodden
trenches along the Aisne. For a week it had rained, cold shower
following cold shower. In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors
in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm--autumn's
quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought
across this same country a fortnight before. It was into trenches half
filled with water that the new men were going--Frenchmen trundling over
to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go
galloping back with a bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread;
Englishmen, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their fingers
and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for their tea.

There were Highlanders among them, men with necks like towers and
straight, flat backs and a swing of the shoulders--like band music going
past. One watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of pang.
What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was
man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now,
with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut
off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!

All that night it rained, and, through the rain and dark, trains kept
pouring on up into the terrible north. Once I heard cattle lowing as
their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night,
saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain that had
beaten them for days. And just before a feeble daylight returned again,
the steady rumble of artillery.

After noon there was a break in the clouds, and we started on foot for
Villers-Cotterets, some fifteen kilometres away. The hard macadam road
was no more than dampened, and ambulances and motor-trucks went scooting
by as on a city street. Occasionally there was an abandoned trench,
once a broken caisson, and the wreck of an aeroplane, but the wheat was
harvested and stacked. Beyond Vaumoise the country grew more hilly, and
the caves and quarries, which the Germans were making such effective use
of along the Aisne, began to appear.

And all this time the cannon were thundering--so close that it seem