day. Though the British
occupy this country, it is not often one sees them as a multitude. When
in the trenches, you are concerned with but a handful of your fellows.
But just then an interminable river of steel helmets poured along in
regular waves.

It is something to be able to say you have seen a British army moving
down the straight leagues of a French road through its guarding avenue
of trees. My own brother may have been in that host.... Yet I never
thought of him. A torrent of sounds swamped and submerged my
thoughts--the clangour of chains, the rumbling of wheels, the deep
growling of guns; and that most ominous and subduing sound in war, the
ceaseless rhythmic tramp of armed men marching without music or song,
men who, except the menace of their measured progress, that intimation
of destiny and fate irresistible, are but a multitude of expressionless
masks that glance at you, and pass.

These men are all dressed alike; they are a tide of men. They all look
alike. Their mouths are set. They move together with the common,
irresistible, uncritical urge of migratory animals. Their eyes fix you
in a single ceaseless interrogation. About what?

There is no knowing. Don't ask me what the men are thinking in
Flanders; I don't know, and I have been with them since the beginning.
And I don't think any one else does.

But once, as this division was passing, one of those little go-carts on
perambulator wheels in which the men, holding drag-ropes, transport
their own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would have
recognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, to
recover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few moments
into something human and understandable. The wind took a few escaped
leaves and blew them to me. The _Pickwick Papers_!

It was as though the inscrutable eye of the army had tipped me a wink.

I got the hint that I was, in the right sense, on the same road as
these men. My brother was certainly there. For sometimes, you know, one
has a bleak sense of doubt about that, a feeling of extreme isolation
and polar loneliness. You wonder, at times, mixed up here in the
mysterious complexities of that elemental impulse which is visible as
ceaseless clouds of fire on the Somme, whether you are the last man,
witnessing in helpless and mute horror the motiveless upheaval of earth
in final ruin.

So that, even as I write this, and glance, safe for tonight, at the
stran