Travelling with two chauffeurs is not the luxury it looks; since there is only one of you and there is always another of those iron men to relieve the wheel.  Nor can I decide whether an ex-professor of the German tongue, or an ex-roadracer who has lived six years abroad, or a Marechal des Logis, or a Brigadier makes the most thrusting driver through three-mile stretches of military traffic repeated at half-hour intervals.  Sometimes it was motor-ambulances strung all along a level; or supply; or those eternal big guns coming round corners with trees chained on their long backs to puzzle aeroplanes, and their leafy, big-shell limbers snorting behind them.  In the rare breathing-spaces men with rollers and road metal attacked the road.  In peace the roads of France, thanks to the motor, were none too good.  In war they stand the incessant traffic far better than they did with the tourist.  My impression —­after some seven hundred miles printed off on me at between 60 and 70 kilometres—­was of uniform excellence.  Nor did I come upon any smashes or breakdowns in that distance, and they were certainly trying them hard.  Nor, which is the greater marvel, did we kill anybody; though we did miracles down the streets to avoid babes, kittens, and chickens.  The land is used to every detail of war, and to its grime and horror and make-shifts, but also to war’s unbounded courtesy, kindness, and long-suffering, and the gaiety that comes, thank God, to balance overwhelming material loss.

FARM LIFE AMIDST WAR

There was a village that had been stamped flat, till it looked older than Pompeii.  There were not three roofs left, nor one whole house.  In most places you saw straight into the cellars.  The hops were ripe in the grave-dotted fields round about.  They had been brought in and piled in the nearest outline of a dwelling.  Women sat on chairs on the pavement, picking the good-smelling bundles.  When they had finished one, they reached back and pulled out another through the window-hole behind them, talking and laughing the while.  A cart had to be maneuvered out of what had been a farmyard, to take the hops to market.  A thick, broad, fair-haired wench, of the sort that Millet drew, flung all her weight on a spoke and brought the cart forward into the street.  Then she shook herself, and, hands on hips, danced a little defiant jig in her sabots as she went back to get the horse.  Another girl came across a bridge.  She was precisely of the opposite type, slender, creamy-skinned, and delicate-featured.  She carried a brand-new broom over her shoulder through that desolation, and bore herself with the pride and grace of Queen Iseult.

The farm-girl came out leading the horse, and as the two young things passed they nodded and smiled at each other, with the delicate tangle of the hop-vines at their feet.