Ahead was the army’s larder on wheels; a procession of big motor transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision of a battleship fleet at sea.  We should have known that they belonged to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass.  All army transports are like that.  What the deuced right has anybody to pass?  They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front of them.  Our car in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of; which proves again how closely European armies are tied to their fine highways.  We got out, and here again was our statesman putting his shoulder to the wheel.  That is the way of the French in war.  Everybody tries to help.  By this time the transport chauffeurs remembered that they also were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are polite even in time of war, they let us by.

A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.

“Stop here!” he called.

Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard instantly and obeyed.  In front of them was a line of single horse-drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear.  They could take paths that the motor trucks could not.  Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as a relic of how armies were fed in other days.  For the first time I was realizing what the motor truck means to war.  It brings the army impedimenta close up to the army’s rear; it means a reduction of road space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.

All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport broken down.  And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been an army on the road.  The valuable part of our experience was exactly in this:  a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-marching and attack.  Order one expected afterwards, behind the siege line of trenches, when there had been time to establish a routine; organization and smooth organization you had here at the climax of a month’s strain.  It told the story of the character of the French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage.  The brains were not all with the German Staff.

That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne.  Soissons was ours, we knew, since yesterday.  How much farther had we gone?  Was our advance still continuing?  For then, winter trench-fighting was unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success with success.  Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the Germans speedily put out of France.  The appetite for victory grew, after a week’s bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day.