Soon a great transport was pointed out to me, lying beside the jetty.  Gangplanks were down, and up them streams of men in khaki moved endlessly.  Up they went, in an endless brown river, to disappear into the ship.  The whole ship was a very hive of activity.  Not only men were going aboard, but supplies of every sort; boxes of ammunition, stores, food.  And I understood, and was presently to see, that beyond her sides there was the same ordered scene as prevailed on shore.  Every man knew his task; the stowing away of everything that was being carried aboard was being carried out systematically and with the utmost possible economy of time and effort.

“That’s the ship you will cross the Channel on,” I was told.  And I regarded her with a new interest.  I do not know what part she had been wont to play in time of peace; what useful, pleasant journeys it had been her part to complete, I only knew that she was to carry me to France, and to the place where my heart was and for a long time had been.  Me—­and two thousand men who were to be of real use over there!

We were nearly the last to go on board.  We found the decks swarming with men.  Ah, the braw laddies!  They smoked and they laughed as they settled themselves for the trip.  Never a one looked as though he might be sorry to be there.  They were leaving behind them all the good things, all the pleasant things, of life as, in time of peace, every one of them had learned to live it and to know it.  Long, long since had the last illusion faded of the old days when war had seemed a thing of pomp and circumstance and glory.

They knew well, those boys, what it was they faced.  Hard, grinding work they could look forward to doing; such work as few of them had ever known in the old days.  Death and wounds they could reckon upon as the portion of just about so many of them.  There would be bitter cold, later, in the trenches, and mud, and standing for hours in icy mud and water.  There would be hard fare, and scanty, sometimes, when things went wrong.  There would be gas attacks, and the bursting of shells about them with all sorts of poisons in them.  Always there would be the deadliest perils of these perilous days.

But they sang as they set out upon the great adventure of their lives.  They smiled and laughed.  They cheered me, so that the tears started from my eyes, when they saw me, and they called the gayest of gay greetings, though they knew that I was going only for a little while, and that many of them had set foot on British soil for the last time.  The steady babble of their voices came to our ears, and they swarmed below us like ants as they disposed themselves about the decks, and made the most of the scanty space that was allowed for them.  The trip was to be short, of course; there were too few ships, and the problems of convoy were too great, to make it possible to make the voyage a comfortable one.  It was a case of getting them over as might best be arranged.