"G.H.Q."--General
Headquarters--that mysterious centre and brain of all things--invites us
for two days! If we accept, an officer will come for us on the morning of
March 1st to our hotel in Boulogne and take us by motor, some forty miles,
to the guest-house where G.H.Q. puts up its visitors. "_Accept!"_ Ah, if
one could only forget for a moment the human facts behind the absorbing
interest and excitement of this journey, one might be content to feel only
the stir of quickened pulses, of gratitude for a further opportunity so
tremendous.

As it was, I saw all the journey henceforward with new eyes, because of
that to which it was bringing us. On we sped, through the French
countryside, past a great forest lying black on the edge of the white
horizon--I open my map and find it marked Bois de Crecy!--past another old
town, with Agincourt a few miles to the east, and so into a region of pine
and sand that borders the sea. Darkness comes down, and we miss our way.
What are these lines of light among the pine woods? Another military and
hospital camp, which we are to see on the morrow--so we discover at last.
But we have overshot our goal, and must grope our way back through the
pine woods to the sea-shore, where a little primitive hotel, built for the
summer, with walls that seem to be made of brown paper, receives us. But
we have motored far that day, and greet it joyfully.

The following morning we woke to a silvery sunlight, with, at last, some
promise of spring over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent in going
through a camp which has been set down in one of the pleasantest and
healthiest spots of France, a favourite haunt of French artists before the
war. Now the sandy slopes, whence the pines, alack, have been cut away,
are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, by long lines of hospitals,
by a convalescent depot, and by the training-grounds, where, as at other
bases, the newly arrived troops are put through their last instruction
before going to the front. As usual, the magnitude of what has been done
in one short year filled one with amazement. Here is the bare catalogue:
Infantry Base Depots, i.e. sleeping and mess quarters, for thousands of
men belonging to the new armies; 16 hospitals with 21,000 beds, 3 rifle
ranges; 2 training-camps; a machine-gun training-school; a vast laundry
worked by Frenchwomen under British organisation, which washes for _all_
the hospitals, 30,000 pieces a day; recreation huts