At the railway crossing there was a great park of motor lorries.  They, too, seemed to be waiting for new loads.  Obviously this was one of the “railheads” about which I had a lecture that morning from a distinguished officer, who thinks in railheads and refilling stations and other details of transport upon which the armies in the field depend for their food and ammunition.  Without that explanation all these roadside halts, all these stationary lorries and forage carts would have seemed like a temporary stagnation in the business of war, with nothing doing.

A thrill comes to every one when he sees bodies of British troops moving along the roads.  He is glad when his motorcar gets held up by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a “Hullo, boys!  How’s it going?  And who are you?” After all the thrill of the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the enthusiasm with which they sang Tipperary through the streets of their first port of call in France, they had settled down to the real business.

Some of them had been into the trenches for the first time a night or two before.  “How did you like it?” Well, it wasn’t amusing to them, it seems, but they “stuck it.”  They were ready to go again.  That was the spirit of it all.  They “stuck it,” gamely, without grousing, without swanking, without any other thought than suffering all the hardships and all the thrills of war like men who know the gravity of the game, and the risks, and the duty to which they have pledged themselves.

I passed thousands of these men on a long motor journey on my first day at the British front, and though I could not speak to very many of them I saw on all their faces the same hard, strong, dogged look of men who were being put through a great ordeal and who would not fail through any moral weakness.  They were tired, some of them, after a long march, but they grinned back cheery answers to my greetings, and scrambled merrily for the few packets of cigarettes I tossed to them.

Thousands of these khaki-clad fellows lay along the roadsides looking in the distance as though great masses of russet leaves had fallen from autumn trees.  They were having a rest on their way up to the front, and their heads were upon each other’s shoulders in a comradely way, while some lay face upwards to the sky with their hands folded behind their heads, in a brown study and careless of everything that passed.

Away across marshy fields, intersected by pools and rivulets, I saw our men billeted in French and Flemish farmhouses, of the old post-and-plaster kind, like those in English villages.

They seemed thoroughly at home, and were chopping wood and drawing water and cooking stews, and arranging straw beds in the barns, and busying themselves with all the domestic side of life as quietly and cheerily as though they were on manoeuvres in Devonshire or Surrey, where war is only a game without death in the roar of a gun.  Well fed and well clothed, hard as nails, in spite of all their hardships, they gave me a sense of pride as I watched them, for the spirit of the old race was in them, and they would stick it through thick and thin.