We had need to sing.  No sun rose, but the day broke over an ugly plain with hardly any trees, and that grey and wretched dawn came in with a cold and dispiriting rain unrefreshed by wind.  Colson, who was a foolish little man (the son of a squire), marching by my side, wondered where and how we should be dried that day.  The army was for ever producing problems for Colson, and I was often his comforter.  He liked to talk to me and hear about England, and the rich people and their security, and how they never served as soldiers (from luxury), and how (what he could not understand) the poor had a bargain struck with them by the rich whereby they also need not serve.  I could learn from him the meaning of many French words which I did not yet know.  He had some little education; had I asked the more ignorant men of my battery, they would only have laughed, but he had read, in common books, of the differences between nations, and could explain many things to me.

Colson, then, complaining of the rain, and wondering where he should get dried, I told him to consider not so much the happy English, but rather his poor scabbard and how he should clean it after the march, and his poor clothes, all coated with mud, and needing an hour’s brushing, and his poor temper, which, if he did not take great care, would make him grow up to be an anti-militarist and a byword.

So we wrangled, and it still rained.  Our songs grew rarer, and there was at last no noise but the slush of all those feet beating the muddy road, and the occasional clank of metal as a scabbard touched some other steel, or a slung carbine struck the hilt of a bayonet.  It was well on in the morning when the guns caught us up and passed us; the drivers all shrouded in their coats and bending forward in the rain; the guns coated and splashed with thick mud, and the horses also threatened hours of grooming.  I looked mine up and down as Labbe passed on them, and I groaned, for it is a rule that a man grooms his own horses whether he has ridden them or no, and after all, day in and day out, it works fair.  The guns disappeared into the mist of rain, and we went on through more hours of miserable tramping, seeing no spire ahead of us, and unable to count on a long halt.

Still, as we went, I noticed that we were on some great division, between provinces perhaps, or between river valleys, for in France there are many bare upland plateaus dividing separate districts; and it is a feature of the country that the districts so divided have either formed separate provinces in the past or, at any rate (even if they have not had political recognition), have stood, and do still stand, for separate units in French society.  It was more apparent with every mile as we went on that we were approaching new things.  The plain was naked save for rare planted trees, and here and there, a long way off (on the horizon, it seemed) a farm or two, unprotected and alone.