Between the fusees the curious shuffling of feet and a deeper shadow were all that told of the passage of these troops.  It was so dark that one could see no faces.  But here and there one saw the light of a cigarette.  The mere hardship of walking for miles along those roads, paved with round stones and covered with mud on which their feet slipped continually, must have been a great one, and agonizing for feet that had been frosted in the water of the trenches.

Afterward I inquired what these men carried.  They loomed up out of the night like pack horses.  I found that each soldier carried, in addition to his rifle and bayonet, a large knapsack, a canteen, a cartridge pouch, a brown haversack containing tobacco, soap, towel and food, a billy-can and a rolled blanket.

German batteries were firing intermittently as we stood there.  The rain poured down.  I had dressed to go out to tea and wore my one and only good hat.  I did the only thing that seemed possible—­I took off that hat and put it in the automobile and let the rain fall on my unprotected head.  The hat had to see me through the campaign, and my hair would stand water.

At last an armoured car came along and pulled the automobile onto the road.  But after a progress of only ten feet it lapsed again, and there remained.

The situation was now acute.  It was impossible to go back, and to go ahead meant to advance on foot along roads crowded with silent soldiers—­meant going forward, too, in a pouring rain and in high-heeled shoes.  For that was another idiocy I had committed.

We started on, leaving the apologetic chauffeur by the car.  A few feet and the road, curving to the right, began to near the German line.  Every now and then it was necessary to call sharply to the troops, or struggling along through the rain they would have crowded us off knee-deep into the mud.

“Attention!" the officer would call sharply.  And for a time we would have foot room.  There were no more horses, no more guns—­only men, men, men.  Some of them had taken off their outer coats and put them shawl-fashion over their heads.  But most of them walked stolidly on, already too wet and wretched to mind the rain.

The fog had lifted.  It was possible to see that sinister red streak that follows the firing of a gun at night.  The rain gave a peculiar hollowness to the concussion.  The Belgian and French batteries were silent.

We seemed to have walked endless miles, and still there was no little town.  We went over a bridge, and on its flat floor I stopped and rested my aching feet.

“Only a little farther now,” said the British officer cheerfully.

“How much farther?”

“Not more than a mile,”

By way of cheering me he told me about the town we were approaching—­how the road we were on was its main street, and that the advanced line of trenches crossed at the railroad near the foot of the street.