ournalists, poets, artists of
many nationalities came to do the town. They saw the Ridge under its
blanket of shell-smoke, the mighty columns of transport, all the
complex, enormous organization of that secret world, peeked into German
dugouts, and in common with all observers estimated the distance of the
nearest shell-burst from their own persons.

Many were amazed to find that generals worked in chateaux over maps,
directing by telephone, instead of standing on hilltops to give their
commands, and that war was a systematic business, which made those who
had been at the front writing and writing to prove that it was wonder if
nobody read what they wrote. An American who said that he did not see
why all the trucks and horses and wagons and men did not lose their way
was suggestive of the first vivid impressions which the "new eye"
brought to the scene. Another praised my first book for the way it had
made life at the front clear and then proceeded to state his surprise at
finding that trenches did not run straight, but in traverses, and that
soldiers lived in houses instead of tents and gunners did not see their
targets. Now he had seen this mighty army at work for himself. It is the
only way. I give up hope of making others see it.

So grim the processes of fighting, so lacking in picturesqueness, that
one welcomed any of the old symbols of war. I regretted yet rejoiced
that the horse was still a factor. It was good to think that the
gasoline engine had saved the sore backs of the pack animals of other
days, removed the horror of dead horses beside the road and horses
driven to exhaustion by the urgency of fierce necessity, and that a
shell in the transport meant a radiator smashed instead of flesh torn
and scattered. Yet the horse was still serving man at the front and the
dog still flattering him. I have seen dogs lying dead on the field where
the mascot of a battalion had run along with the men in a charge; dogs
were found in German dugouts, and one dog adopted by a corps staff had
refused to leave the side of his fallen master, a German officer, until
the body was removed.

The horse brought four-footed life into the dead world of the slope,
patiently drawing his load, mindless of gun-blasts and the shriek of
shell-fragments once he was habituated to them. As he can pass over
rough ground, he goes into areas where no motor vehicle except the tanks
may go. He need not wait on the road-builders before he takes the