Once I did get the sensation of fighting men existing in bulk.  It was at the baths of a new division—­the New Army.  I will mention in passing that the real enthusiasm of Generals concerning the qualities of the New Army was most moving—­and enheartening.

The baths establishment was very British—­much more British than any of those operating it perhaps imagined.  Such a phenomenon could probably be seen on no other front.  It had been contrived out of a fairly large factory.  It was in charge of a quite young subaltern, no doubt anxious to go and fight, but condemned indefinitely to the functions of baths-keeper.  In addition to being a baths-keeper this young subaltern was a laundry-manager; for when bathing the soldiers left their underclothing and took fresh.  The laundry was very large; it employed numerous local women and girls at four francs a day.  It had huge hot drying-rooms where the women and girls moved as though the temperature was sixty degrees instead of being over a hundred.  All these women and girls were beautiful, all had charm, all were more or less ravishing—­simply because for days we had been living in a harsh masculine world—­a world of motor-lorries, razors, trousers, hob-nailed boots, maps, discipline, pure reason, and excessively few mirrors.  An interesting item of the laundry was a glass-covered museum of lousy shirts, product of prolonged trench-life in the earlier part of the war, and held by experts to surpass all records of the kind!

The baths themselves were huge and simple—­a series of gigantic steaming vats in which possibly a dozen men lathered themselves at once.  Here was fighting humanity; you could see it in every gesture.  The bathers, indeed, appeared to be more numerous than they in fact were.  Two hundred and fifty could undress, bathe, and re-clothe themselves in an hour, and twelve hundred in a morning.  Each man of course would be free to take as many unofficial baths, in tin receptacles and so on, as he could privately arrange for and as he felt inclined for.  Companies of dirty men marching to the baths, and companies of conceitedly clean men marching from the baths, helped to strengthen the ever-growing suspicion that a great Army must be hidden somewhere in the neighbourhood.

Nevertheless, I still saw not the ultimate destination of all those streams of supply which I have described.

I had, however, noted a stream in the contrary direction—­that is, westwards and southwards towards the Channel and England.  You can first trace the beginnings of this stream under the sound of the guns (which you never see).  A stretcher brought to a temporary shelter by men whose other profession is to play regimental music; a group of men bending over a form in the shelter; a glimpse of dressings and the appliances necessary for tying up an artery or some other absolutely urgent job.  That shelter is called the Aid Post.  From it the horizontal form goes to (2) the Advanced