sappers and miners with picks and spades, pontoon-wagons, carts piled high with what looked like masses of yellow silk but which proved to be balloons, bicyclists with carbines slung upon their backs hunter-fashion, aeroplane outfits, bearded and spectacled doctors of the medical corps, armoured motor-cars with curved steel rails above them as a protection against the wires which the Belgians were in the habit of stringing across the roads, battery after battery of pom-poms (as the quick-firers are descriptively called), and after them more batteries of spidery-looking, lean-barrelled machine-guns, more Uhlans—­the sunlight gleaming on their lance-tips and the breeze fluttering their pennons into a black-and-white cloud above them, and then infantry in spiked and linen-covered helmets, more infantry and still more infantry—­all sweeping by, irresistibly as a mighty river, with their faces turned towards France.

This was the Ninth Field Army, composed of the very flower of the German Empire, including the magnificent troops of the Imperial Guard.  It was first and last a fighting army.  The men were all young, and they struck me as being as keen as razors and as hard as nails.  Their equipment was the acme to all appearances ordinary two-wheeled farm-carts, contained “nests” of nine machine-guns which could instantly be brought into action.  The medical corps was magnificent; as businesslike, as completely equipped, and as efficient as a great city hospital—­as, indeed, it should be, for no hospital ever built was called upon to treat so many emergency cases.  One section of the medical corps consisted wholly of pedicurists, who examined and treated the feet of the men.  If a German soldier has even a suspicion of a corn or a bunion or a chafed heel and does not instantly report to the regimental pedicurist for treatment he is subject to severe punishment.  He is not permitted to neglect his feet—­or for that matter his teeth, or any other portion of his body—­because his feet do not belong to him but to the Kaiser, and the Kaiser expects those feet kept in condition to perform long and arduous marches and to fight his battles.

At one cross-roads I saw a soldier with a horse-clipping machine.  An officer stood beside him and closely scanned the heads of the passing men.  Whenever he spied a soldier whose hair was a fraction of an inch too long, that soldier was called out of the ranks, the clipper was run over his head as quickly and dexterously as an expert shearer fleeces sheep, and then the man, his hair once more too short to harbour dirt, ran to rejoin his company.  They must have cut the hair of a hundred men an hour.  It was a fascinating performance.  Men on bicycles, with coils of insulated wire slung on reels between them, strung field-telephones from tree to tree, so that the general commanding could converse with any part of the fifty-mile-long column.  The whole army never slept.  When half was resting the other half was advancing.