We returned to Crepy.  All that night the trains went clanking through the station, pouring more men—­Frenchmen, Englishmen—­into the sodden trenches along the Aisne.  For a week it had rained, cold shower following cold shower.  In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm—­autumn’s quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought across this same country a fortnight before.  It was into trenches half filled with water that the new men were going—­Frenchmen trundling over to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go galloping back with a bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread; Englishmen, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their fingers and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for their tea.

There were Highlanders among them, men with necks like towers and straight, flat backs and a swing of the shoulders—­like band music going past.  One watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of pang.  What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was man’s normal business might have fought their way through, must now, with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!

All that night it rained, and, through the rain and dark, trains kept pouring on up into the terrible north.  Once I heard cattle lowing as their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night, saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain that had beaten them for days.  And just before a feeble daylight returned again, the steady rumble of artillery.

After noon there was a break in the clouds, and we started on foot for Villers-Cotterets, some fifteen kilometres away.  The hard macadam road was no more than dampened, and ambulances and motor-trucks went scooting by as on a city street.  Occasionally there was an abandoned trench, once a broken caisson, and the wreck of an aeroplane, but the wheat was harvested and stacked.  Beyond Vaumoise the country grew more hilly, and the caves and quarries, which the Germans were making such effective use of along the Aisne, began to appear.

And all this time the cannon were thundering—­so close that it seemed each hilltop would bring them into view, and as the detonation puffed across the landscape, one even fancied one could feel the concussion in one’s ear.  Up from a field ahead of us an aeroplane rose and, in a wide spiral, went climbing up the sky, now almost cleared, and presently disappeared in the north.  Then, after satisfying a sentry that our papers were correct—­such things could be done in those first days—­we got into Villers-Cotterets.  Instead of deserted houses we found that nearly every house was quartering soldiers.  There were infantrymen, dragoons, flyers, Senegalese, Algerians in white turbans and burnooses on their desert horses, and everywhere officers.  We had stumbled into a headquarters!