d up to give trucks and guns passageway. In every
face was the shining desire which overcomes fatigue. An army long
trench-tied was stretching its limbs as it found itself in the open. At
corps headquarters lines were drawn on the maps of positions gained and
beyond them the lines of new objectives.

Could it be possible that our car was running along that road back of
the first-line trenches where it would have been death to show your head
two days ago? And could battalions in reserve be lying in the open on
fields where forty-eight hours previously a company would have drawn the
fire of half a dozen German batteries? Was it dream or reality that you
were walking about in the first-line German trenches? So long had you
been used to stationary warfare, with your side and the other side
always in the same places hedged in by walls of shell fire, that the
transformation seemed as amazing as if by some magic overnight lower
Broadway with all its high buildings had been moved across the North
River.

Among certain scenes which memory still holds dissociated from others by
their outstanding characterization, that of Minden Post remains vivid
as illustrating the crossroads man-traffic of battle. A series of big
dugouts, of houses and caves with walls of sandbags, back of the first
British line near Carnoy was a focus of communication trenches and the
magnet to the men hastening from bullet-swept, shell-swept spaces to
security. The hot breath of the firing-line had scorched them and cast
them out and they came together in congestion at this clearing station
like a crowd at a gate. Eyes were bloodshot and set in deep hollows from
fatigue, those of the British having the gleam of triumph and those of
the Germans a dazed inquiry as they awaited directions.

Only a half-hour before, perhaps, the Germans had been fighting with the
ferocity of racial hate and the method of iron discipline. Now they were
simply helpless, disheveled human beings, their short boots and green
uniforms whitened by chalk dust. Hunger had weakened the stamina of many
of them in the days when the preliminary British bombardment had shut
them off from supplies; but none looked as if he were really underfed. I
never saw a German prisoner who was except for the intervals when battle
kept the food waiting at the rear away from his mouth, though some who
were under-sized and ill-proportioned looked incapable of absorbing
nutrition.

In order to make them fi