By afternoon he noted an extraordinary amount of movement in the village.  Georgette, the Warden’s daughter, brought the news that many enormous automobiles and soldiers, French soldiers, were beginning to pass through the main street.  In a little while a procession began filing past on the high road near the castle, leading to the bridge over the Marne.  This was composed of motor trucks, open and closed, that still had their old commercial signs under their covering of dust and spots of mud.  Many of them displayed the names of business firms in Paris, others the names of provincial establishments.  With these industrial vehicles requisitioned by mobilization were others from the public service which produced in Desnoyers the same effect as a familiar face in a throng of strangers.  On their upper parts were the names of their old routes:—­“Madeleine-Bastille, Passy-Bourne,” etc.  Probably he had travelled many times in these very vehicles, now shabby and aged by twenty days of intense activity, with dented planks and twisted metal, perforated like sieves, but rattling crazily on.

Some of the conveyances displayed white discs with a red cross in the center; others had certain letters and figures comprehensible only to those initiates in the secrets of military administration.  Within these vehicles—­the only new and strong motors—­he saw soldiers, many soldiers, but all wounded, with head and legs bandaged, ashy faces made still more tragic by their growing beards, feverish eyes looking fixedly ahead, mouths so sadly immobile that they seemed carven by agonizing groans.  Doctors and nurses were occupying various carriages in this convoy escorted by several platoons of horsemen.  And mingled with the slowly moving horses and automobiles were marching groups of foot-soldiers, with cloaks unbuttoned or hanging from their shoulders like capes—­wounded men who were able to walk and joke and sing, some with arms in splints across their breasts, others with bandaged heads with clotted blood showing through the thin white strips.

The millionaire longed to do something for these brave fellows, but he had hardly begun to distribute some bottles of wine and loaves of bread before a doctor interposed, upbraiding him as though he had committed a crime.  His gifts might result fatally.  So he had to stand beside the road, sad and helpless, looking after the sorrowful convoy. . . .  By nightfall the vehicles filled with the sick were no longer filing by.

He now saw hundreds of drays, some hermetically sealed with the prudence that explosive material requires, others with bundles and boxes that were sending out a stale odor of provisions.  Then came great herds of cattle raising thick, whirling clouds of dust in the narrow parts of the road, prodded on by the sticks and yells of the shepherds in kepis.