Progress is not easy.  It is a pitch-black night.  By day, this road (and all the countryside) is a wilderness:  nothing more innocent ever presented itself to the eye of an inquisitive aeroplane.  But after nightfall it is packed with troops and transport, and not a light is shown.  If you can imagine what the Mansion House crossing would be like if called upon to sustain its midday traffic at midnight—­the Mansion House crossing entirely unilluminated, paved with twelve inches of liquid mud, intersected by narrow strips of pave, and liberally pitted with “crump-holes”—­you may derive some faint idea of the state of things at a busy road-junction lying behind the trenches.

Until reaching what is facetiously termed “the shell area”—­as if any spot in this benighted district were not a shell area—­the troops plod along in fours at the right of the road.  If they can achieve two miles an hour, they do well.  At any moment they may be called upon to halt, and crowd into the roadside, while a transport-train passes carrying rations, and coke, and what is called “R.E. material”—­this may be anything from a bag of nails to steel girders nine feet long—­up to the firing-line.  When this procession, consisting of a dozen limbered waggons, drawn by four mules and headed by a profane person on horseback—­the Transport Officer—­has rumbled past, the Company, which has been standing respectfully in the ditch, enjoying a refreshing shower-bath of mud and hoping that none of the steel girders are projecting from the limber more than a yard or two, sets out once more upon its way—­only to take hasty cover again as sounds of fresh and more animated traffic are heard approaching from the opposite direction.  There is no mistaking the nature of this cavalcade:  the long vista of glowing cigarette-ends tells an unmistakable tale.  These are artillery waggons, returning empty from replenishing the batteries; scattering homely jests like hail, and proceeding, wherever possible, at a hand-gallop.  He is a cheery soul, the R.A. driver, but his interpretation of the rules of the road requires drastic revision.

Sometimes an axle breaks, or a waggon side-slips off the pave into the morass reserved for infantry, and overturns.  The result is a block, which promptly extends forward and back for a couple of miles.  A peculiarly British chorus of inquiry and remonstrance—­a blend of biting sarcasm and blasphemous humour—­surges up and down the line; until plunging mules are unyoked, and the offending vehicle man-handled out of sight into the inky blackness by the roadside; or, in extreme cases, is annihilated with axes.  Everything has to make way for a ration train.  To crown all, it is more than likely that the calmness and smooth working of the proceedings will be assisted by a burst of shrapnel overhead.  It is a most amazing scrimmage altogether.  One of those members of His Majesty’s Opposition who are doing so much at present to save