efully prepared raids on
Hun trenches, one whole fortnight in a riverside village where even the
Boche night-bombers did not come, and where we held a joyous
race-meeting--seventy riders in one race--and a spit-and-polish horse
show. There was the fresh burst by the Hun armies that seemed to spell
the doom of Reims. We began to notice larger and larger bodies of
arriving Americans, but did not expect them to be in the war on an
impressive scale until 1918 was out. Leave to England remained at a
standstill. The universal phrase of 1916 and 1917, "Roll on Duration,"
had almost entirely disappeared from the men's letters that came before
me for censoring. Yet no one seemed depressed. Every one appeared
possessed of a sane and calm belief that things would work out right in
the long-run. We should just have to hold the Hun off this year, and by
honest endeavour during training opportunities fit ourselves to fight
with added effectiveness in 1919, when America would be properly in the
field and the Allies' turn would come.

The second week in May the Brigade, after a fourteen-mile march, came
again into the land of rolling heights and sunken roads in which for
three and a half years most of our fighting had been done. A "sausage"
balloon anchored to the ground, a pumping-station and four
square-shaped water-troughs, and a dozen or so shanties built of
sandbags and rusted iron, dotted the green-and-brown landscape.

Waggon tracks had cut ugly brown ways through clover-fields and
grasslands. A new system of trenches stretched to north and to south
from the main road along which the Brigade were moving. Men of the
Labour Corps were stolidly filling shell-holes in the road surface with
broken stones, and digging sump-holes for draining away the
rain-and-mud torrents that were sure to come. A long dark wood crowned
the ridge three miles in front of us. In the centre a slender spire
tipped the tree-tops.

"That's Baisieux Church," said Major Bullivant, with whom I was riding
along the horse track at the side of the road. "Do you know the latest
motto for the Labour Corps?" he added inconsequentially, looking down
at a bespectacled man in khaki who eased up as we passed. "_Infra
dig._," he went on, with a humorous side-glance, and without pausing
for my answer.

Away to the east muffled boomings as if giants were shaking blankets.
My mind turned to July 1916, when first I arrived in France and came
along this very road at 3.30