But it was not only that sort of wreckage, that sort of driftwood that was being carried back to be made over.  Presently we began to see great motor ambulances coming along, each with a Red Cross painted glaringly on its side—­though that paint was wasted or worse, for there is no target the Hun loves better, it would seem, than the great red cross of mercy.  And in them, as we knew, there was the most pitiful wreckage of all—­the human wreckage of the war.

In the wee sma’ hours of the morn they bear the men back who have been hit the day before and during the night.  They go back to the field dressing stations and the hospitals just behind the front, to be sorted like the other wreckage.  Some there are who cannot be moved further, at first, but must he cared for under fire, lest they die on the way.  But all whose wounds are such that they can safely be moved go back in the ambulances, first to the great base hospitals, and then, when possible, on the hospital ships to England.

Sometimes, but not often, we passed troops marching along the road.  They swung along.  They marched easily, with the stride that could carry them furthest with the least effort.  They did not look much like the troops I used to see in London.  They did not have the snap of the Coldstream Guards, marching through Green Park in the old days.  But they looked like business and like war.  They looked like men who had a job of work to do and meant to see it through.

They had discipline, those laddies, but it was not the old, stiff discipline of the old army.  That is a thing of a day that is dead and gone.  Now, as we passed along the side of the road that marching troops always leave clear, there was always a series of hails for me.

“Hello, Harry!” I would hear.

And I would look back, and see grinning Tommies waving their hands to me.  It was a flattering experience, I can tell you, to be recognized like that along that road.  It was like running into old friends in a strange town where you have come thinking you know no one at all.

We were about thirty miles out of Boulogne when there was a sudden explosion underneath the car, followed by a sibilant sound that I knew only too well.

“Hello—­a puncture!” said Godfrey, and smiled as he turned around.  We drew up to the side of the road, and both chauffeurs jumped out and went to work on the recalcitrant tire.  The rest of us sat still, and gazed around us at the fields.  I was glad to have a chance to look quietly about.  The fields stretched out, all emerald green, in all directions to the distant horizon, sapphire blue that glorious morning.  And in the fields, here and there, were the bent, stooped figures of old men and women.  They were carrying on, quietly.  Husbands and sons and brothers had gone to war; all the young men of France had gone.  These were left, and they were seeing to the performance of the endless cycle of duty.  France would survive; the Hun could not crush her.  Here was a spirit made manifest—­a spirit different in degree but not in kind from the spirit of my ain Britain.  It brought a lump into my throat to see them, the old men and the women, going so patiently and quietly about their tasks.