It has all been so quietly done!  Yet it is really a great moment.  The store of man power which Great Britain possesses is beginning to take practical effect.  The French, who held the long lines at the beginning of war, who stood before Verdun and threw their legions on the road to Peronne, are now being freed for work elsewhere.  They have “carried on” till Great Britain was ready, and now she is ready.

* * * * *

This was more than the beginning of a new tour of duty [says another witness].  I felt the need of some ceremony, and I think others felt the need of it too.  There were little half-articulate attempts, in the darkness, of men trying to show what they felt—­a whisper or two—­in the queer jargon that is growing up between the two armies.  An English sentry mounted upon the fire-step, and looked out into the darkness beside the Frenchman, and then, before the Frenchman stepped down, patted him on the shoulder, as though he would say:  “These trenches—­all right!—­we’ll look after them!”

Then I stumbled into a dug-out.  A candle burnt there, and a French officer was taking up his things.  He nodded and smiled.  “I go,” he said.  “I am not sorry, and yet——­” He shrugged his shoulders.  I understood.  One is never sorry to go, but these trenches—­these bits of France, where Frenchmen had died—­would no longer be guarded by Frenchmen.  Then he waved his hand round the little dug-out.  “We give a little more of France into your keeping.”  His gesture was extravagant and light, but his face was grave as he said it.  He turned and went out.  I followed.  He walked along the communication trench after his men, and I along the line of my silent sentries.  I spoke to one or two, and then stood on the fire-step, looking out into the night.  I had the Frenchman’s words in my head:  “We give a little more of France into your keeping!” It was not these trenches only, where I stood, but all that lay out there in the darkness, which had been given into our keeping.  Its dangers were ours now.  There were villages away there in the heart of the night, still unknown to all but the experts at home, whose names—­like Thiepval and Bazentin—­would soon be English names, familiar to every man in Britain as the streets of his own town.  All this France had entrusted to our care this night.

Such were the scenes that were quietly going on, not much noticed by the public at home during the weeks of February and March, and such were the thoughts in men’s minds.  How plainly one catches through the words of the last speaker an eager prescience of events to come!—­the sweep of General Gough on Warlencourt and Bapaume—­the French reoccupation of Peronne.