for the guns. An hour's blockade on
that road would prove infinitely more serious than would a freight
wreck which blocked all four tracks of the New York Central. No wonder
that Lord Derby, in addressing his Pioneer Battalions in Lancashire,
remarked: "In this war the pick and the shovel are as important as the
rifle."

While I was standing on the summit of a little eminence beyond
Fricourt, looking down on that amazing scene of industry, a big German
shell burst squarely on the road. It wrecked a motor-lorry, it killed
several horses and half a dozen men, but, most serious of all, it blew
in the road a hole as large as a cottage cellar. The river of traffic
may have halted for two or three minutes, certainly not more. In
scarcely more time than it takes to tell it, the nearest military
police were on the spot. The stream of vehicles bound for the front
was swung out into the fields at the right, the stream headed for the
rear was diverted into the fields at the left. Within five minutes a
hundred men were at work with pick and shovel filling up the hole
with material piled at frequent intervals along the road for just that
purpose. Within twenty minutes a steam-roller had arrived--goodness
knows where it had materialized from!--and was at work rolling the
road into hardness. Within thirty minutes after the shell burst the
hole which it made no longer existed and the lorries, the tractors,
the wagons, the guns, the buses, the ambulances were rolling on their
way. Then they bore away the six tarpaulin-covered forms beside the
road and buried them.

The weather is a vital factor in war. The heavy rains of a French
winter quickly transform the ground, already churned up by months of
shell-fire, into a slimy, glutinous swamp, incredibly tenacious and
unbelievably deep. Through this vast stretch of mud, pitted everywhere
with shell-holes filled with stagnant water, the infantry has to make
its way and the guns have to be moved forward to support the infantry.
On one stretch of road, only a quarter of a mile long, on the Somme,
twelve horses sank so deeply in the mud that it was impossible to
extricate them and they had to be shot. No wonder that the soldiers,
going up to the trenches, prefer to leave their overcoats and blankets
behind and face the misery of wet and cold rather than be burdened
with the additional weight while struggling through the molasses-like
mire. The only thing that they take up to the trenches whic