'honk, honk' of a motor is followed by
the breathless, panting whirr of the engine, and a big car flashes down
the road and past, travelling at the topmost of its top speed. There
is just time to glimpse the khaki hood and the thick scarlet cross
blazing on a white circle, and the car is gone. Empty as it is, it is
moving fast, and with luck and a clear road it will be well inside the
danger zone at the back door of the trenches in less than twenty
minutes. In half an hour perhaps it will have picked up its full load,
and be sliding back smoothly and gently down the cobbled road, swinging
carefully now to this side to avoid some scattered bricks, now to that
to dodge a shell-hole patched with gravel, driven down as tenderly and
gently as it was driven up fiercely and recklessly.

Presently there are a few quiet orders, a few minutes' stir and
movement, a shifting to and fro of khaki against the green and pink and
white . . . and the companies have fallen in and stand in straight
rulered ranks. A pause, a sharp order or two, and the quick staccato
of 'numbering off' ripples swiftly down the lines; another pause,
another order, the long ranks blur and melt, harden and halt instantly
in a new shape; and evenly and steadily the ranked fours swing off,
turn out into the road, and go tramping down between the poplars.
There has been no flurry, no hustle, no confusion. The whole thing has
moved with the smoothness and precision and effortless ease of a
properly adjusted, well-oiled machine--which, after all, is just what
the regiment is. The pace is apparently leisurely, or even lazy, but
it eats up the miles amazingly, and it can be kept up with the shortest
of halts from dawn to dusk.

As the miles unwind behind the regiment the character of the country
begins to change. There are fewer women and children to be seen now;
there are more roofless buildings, more house-fronts gaping doorless
and windowless, more walls with ragged rents, and tumbled heaps of
brick lying under the yawning black holes. But the grass is still
green, and the trees thick with foliage, the fields neatly ploughed and
tilled and cultivated, with here and there a staring notice planted on
the edge of a field, where the long, straight drills are sprinkled with
budding green--'Crops sown. Do not walk here.' Altogether there is
little sign of the heavy hand of war upon the country, and such signs
as there are remain unobtrusive and wrapped up in