I noticed more and more that the men were exhausted, were at the limit of their endurance.  Then passed a group which was quite fresh.  A Red Cross detachment!  No doubt they had had very little to do.  After them a few horses, grey and white; and then field-kitchens and equipment-carts.  And then a machine-gun on a horse’s back; others in carts; pack-mules with ammunition-boxes; several more machine-gun sections.  And then more field-kitchens.  In one of these the next meal was actually preparing, and steam rose from under a great iron lid.  On every cart was a spare wheel for emergencies; the hub of every wheel was plaited round with straw; the harness was partly of leather and partly of rope ending in iron hooks.  Later came a long Red Cross van, and after it another field-kitchen encumbered with bags and raw meat and strange oddments, and through the interstices of the pile, creeping among bags and raw meat, steam gently mounted, for a meal was maturing in that perambulating kitchen also.  Lastly, came a cart full of stretchers and field-hospital apparatus.  The regiment, its music still faintly audible, had gone by—­self-contained, self-supporting.  There was no showiness of a review, but the normal functioning, the actual dailiness, of a line regiment as it lives strenuously in the midst of war.

My desire was that the young officer in a trance should find a good bed instantly.  The whole thing was fine; it was pathetic; and, above all, it was mysterious.  What was the part of that regiment in the gigantic tactics of Joffre?

However, after a short experience at the front one realises that though the conduct of the campaign may be mysterious, it is neither vague nor casual.  I remember penetrating through a large factory into a small village which constituted one of the latest French conquests.  An officer who had seen the spot just after it was taken, and before it was “organised,” described to me the appearance of the men with their sunken eyes and blackened skins on the day of victory.  They were all very cheerful when I saw them; but how alert, how apprehensive, how watchful!  I felt that I was in a place where anything might happen at any moment.  The village and the factory were a maze of trenches, redoubts, caves, stairs up and stairs down, machine-guns, barbed wire, enfilading devices were all ready.  When we climbed to an attic-floor to look at the German positions, which were not fifty yards away, the Commandant was in a fever till we came down again, lest the Germans might spy us and shell his soldiers.  He did not so much mind them shelling us, but he objected to them shelling his men.  We came down the damaged stairs in safety.