But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the sharpest blasts of the winter.  Here are bodies of men going through some of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line.  The instructors here, as at other training-camps in France, are all men returned from the front.  The men to whom they have to give the final touch of training—­men so near themselves to the real thing—­are impatient of any other sort.

As we stand beside the trenches under the bright sun and piercing wind, looking at the dark lines of British soldiers on the snow, and listening to the explanations of a most keen and courteous officer, one’s eyes wander, on the one side, over the great town and port, over the French coast and the distant sea, and on the other side, inland, over the beautiful French landscape with its farms and country houses.  Everything one sees is steeped in history, a mingled history, in which England and France up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal share.  Now again they are mingled here; all the old enmities buried in a comradeship that goes deeper far than they, a comradeship of the spirit that will surely mould the life of both nations for years to come.

How we grudged the snow and the low-sweeping clouds and the closed motor, on our drive of the next day!  I remember little more of it than occasional glimpses of the tall cliffs that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty look at a fine church above a steeply built town, an army lorry stuck deep in the snow-drifts, and finally the quays and ships of another base port.  Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communications, with a few poor wives and mothers among them who have come over to nurse their wounded in one or other of the innumerable hospitals of the base.

Before dinner the general commanding the base had found me out and I had told my story.

“Oh, we’ll put some notes together for you.  We were up most of last night.  I dare say we shall be up most of this.  But a little more or less doesn’t matter.”  I protested most sincerely.  But it is always the busiest men who shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes duly reached me.  From them, from the talk of others spending their last ounce of brain and energy in the service of the base, and from the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and draw some general picture of what that service is:  Suppose a British officer speaking: