Here and there one saw a sentry, and behind him a tent of curious mottled shades of red, brown and green.

“They look as though they were painted,” I said, rather bewildered.

“They are,” the officer replied promptly.  “From an aeroplane these tents are absolutely impossible to locate.  They merge into the colors of the fields.”

Now and then at a crossroads it was necessary to inquire our way.  I had no wish to run into danger, but I was conscious of a wild longing to have the car take the wrong turning and land abruptly at the advance trenches.  Nothing of the sort happened, however.

We passed small buildings converted into field hospitals and flying the white flag with a red cross.

“There are no nurses in these hospitals,” explained the officer.  “Only one surgeon and a few helpers.  The men are brought here from the trenches, and then taken back at night in ambulances to the railroad or to base hospitals.”

“Are there no nurses at all along the British front?”

“None whatever.  There are no women here in any capacity.  That is why the men are so surprised to see you.”

Here and there, behind the protection of groves and small thickets, were temporary camps, sometimes tents, sometimes tent-shaped shelters of wood.  There were batteries on the right everywhere, great guns concealed in farmyards or, like the guns I had seen on the French front, in artificial hedges.  Some of them were firing; but the firing of a battery amounts to nothing but a great noise in these days of long ranges.  Somewhere across the valley the shells would burst, we knew that; that was all.

The conversation turned to the Prince of Wales, and to the responsibility it was to the various officers to have him in the trenches.  Strenuous efforts had been made to persuade him to be satisfied with the work at headquarters, where he is attached to Sir John French’s staff.  But evidently the young heir to the throne of England is a man in spite of his youth.  He wanted to go out and fight, and he had at last secured permission.

“He has had rather remarkable training,” said the young officer, who was also his friend.  “First he was in Calais with the transport service.  Then he came to headquarters, and has seen how things are done there.  And now he is at the front.”

Quite unexpectedly round a turn in the road we came on a great line of Canadian transports—­American-built lorries with khaki canvas tops.  Canadians were driving them, Canadians were guarding them.  It gave me a homesick thrill at once to see these other Americans, of types so familiar to me, there in Northern France.

Their faces were eager as they pushed ahead.  Some of the tent-shaped wooden buildings were to be temporary barracks for them.  In one place the transports had stopped and the men were cooking a meal beside the road.  Some one had brought a newspaper and a crowd of men had gathered round it.  I wondered if it was an American paper.  I would like to have stood on the running board of the machine, as we went past, and called out that I, too, was an American, and God bless them!