of khaki-clad men, like a writhing brown snake when seen from afar, moved slowly along winding roads, through cornfields where the harvest was cut and stacked, or down long avenues of poplars, interminably straight, or through quaint old towns and villages with whitewashed houses and overhanging gables, and high stone steps leading to barns and dormer-chambers.  Some of those little provincial towns have hardly changed since D’Artagnan and his Musketeers rode on their way to great adventures in the days of Richelieu and Mazarin.  And the spirit of D’Artagnan was still bred in them, in the France of Poincare, for they are the dwelling-places of young men in the cuirassiers and the chasseurs who had been chasing Uhlans through the passes of the Vosges, capturing outposts even though the odds were seven to one.

The English officers and men will never have to complain of their welcome in France.  It was overwhelming—­even a little intoxicating to young soldiers.  As they marched through the towns peasant girls ran along the ranks with great bouquets of wild flowers, which they thrust into the soldiers’ arms.  In every market square where the regiments halted for a rest there was free wine for any thirsty throat, and soldier boys from Scotland or England had their brown hands kissed by girls who were eager for hero worship and had fallen in love with these clean-shaven lads and their smiling grey eyes.  In those early days there seemed no evil in the worship of the women nor in the hearts of the men who marched to the song of “Tipperary.”  Every man in khaki could claim a hero’s homage for himself on any road in France, at any street corner of an old French town.  It was some time before the romance wore off, and the realities of human nature, where good is mixed with evil and blackguardism marches in the same regiment with clean-hearted men, destroyed some of the illusions of the French and demanded an iron discipline from military police and made poor peasant girls repent of their abandonment in the first ecstasy of their joyous welcome.

16

Not yet did the brutalities of the war spoil the picture painted in khaki tones upon the green background of the French countryside.  From my notebook I transcribe one of the word pictures which I wrote at the time.  It is touched with the emotion of those days, and is true to the facts which followed: 

“The weather has been magnificent.  It has been no hardship to sleep out in the roads and fields at night.  A harvest moon floods the country with silver light and glints upon the stacked bayonets of this British Army in France when the men lie down beneath their coats, with their haversacks as pillows.  Each sleeping figure is touched softly by those silver rays while the sentries pace up and down upon the outskirts of the camp.  Some of the days have been intensely hot, but the British Tommy unfastens his coat and leaves his shirt open at the chest, and with the sun