k to for a day; and under all their jokes and good-humour their
farewell had a tinge of wistfulness. But one felt that this fugitive
reminder of a world they had put behind them would pass like a
dream, and their minds revert without effort to the one reality: the
business of holding their bit of France.

It is hard to say why this sense of the French soldier's
single-mindedness is so strong in all who have had even a glimpse of
the front; perhaps it is gathered less from what the men say than
from the look in their eyes. Even while they are accepting
cigarettes and exchanging trench-jokes, the look is there; and when
one comes on them unaware it is there also. In the dusk of the
forest that look followed us down the mountain; and as we skirted
the edge of the ravine between the armies, we felt that on the far
side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on
the near side the men who had been made by it.

IN THE NORTH

June 19th, 1915.

On the way from Doullens to Montreuil-sur-Mer, on a shining summer
afternoon. A road between dusty hedges, choked, literally strangled,
by a torrent of westward-streaming troops of all arms. Every few
minutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor would
wriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by a
widening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed a
dazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling--but through it,
what a sight!

Standing up in the car and looking back, we watched the river of war
wind toward us. Cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and
miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers, they swept
on as smoothly as if in holiday order. Through the dust, the sun
picked out the flash of lances and the gloss of chargers' flanks,
flushed rows and rows of determined faces, found the least touch of
gold on faded uniforms, silvered the sad grey of mitrailleuses and
munition waggons. Close as the men were, they seemed allegorically
splendid: as if, under the arch of the sunset, we had been watching
the whole French army ride straight into glory...

Finally we left the last detachment behind, and had the country to
ourselves. The disfigurement of war has not touched the fields of
Artois. The thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses and
hollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds were weighed down
with layers of elder-blossom. On all sides wheat-fields skirted with
w