“Bien, monsieur,” said Julie, who had been watching the Major admiringly without comprehending a word of what he said.  Women have a way of falling in love with the Major at first sight.

We stumbled along between the rails and over the sleepers, led by the Major, who carried a hurricane lamp, and by the help of its fitful rays we leapt across the pools of water left in every hollow.  We passed some cattle-trucks.  The Major held up the lamp and scrutinised a legend in white letters—­

     Hommes 40.  Chevaux 12.

“Reminds me of the Rule of Three,” said the Major meditatively.  “If one Frenchman is equal to three and one-third horses, how many Huns are equal to one British soldier?”

“They are never equal to him,” said the subaltern brightly.  “If it wasn’t for machinery we’d have crumpled them up long ago.”

“True, my son,” said the Major, “and well spoken.”

The men were grouped round the cattle-trucks, each man with his kit and 120 rounds of ammunition.  They had just been through a kit inspection, and the O.C. in charge of details had audited and found it correct by entering up a memorandum to that effect in each man’s pay-book.  Though how the O.C. completes his inventory of a whole draft, and certifies that nothing from a housewife to thirty pairs of laces per man is missing, is one of those things that no one has ever been able to understand.  Perhaps he has radiographic eyes, and sees through the opaque integument of a ground-sheet at one glance.  Also the Medical Officer at the Base Depot had endorsed the “Marching Out States,” after scrutinising, more or less intimately, each man’s naked body, with the aid of a tallow candle stuck in an empty bottle.  A medical inspection of three hundred men with their shirts up in a dark shed is a weird and bashful spectacle.  An N.C.O. was supervising the entraining at each truck; the escort was marching up and down the permanent way on the off-side.  The R.T.O. handed the movement orders to the senior officer in command of drafts, and I saw that they were going to get a move on very soon.

We were now opposite a first-class compartment, and a slim figure loomed up out of the darkness.

“Halloa! is that you, C——?  I thought you were gone on ahead of us, my boy.”

“So I was, sir, but some of my men are missing, and I’m sending a corporal to hunt them up.  We’re off in a few minutes.  I met young T——­ just now.  I’ve been trying to cheer him up,” he added.  It was evident that the subaltern was now understudying the Major in his star part of cheering other fellows up.  “He’s feeling rather blue,” he continued.  “Depressed at saying good-bye to his friends, you know.”

“Oh, that’s no good.  Tell him I’ve got a plum-pudding and a bottle of whisky among my kit.  Yes, and a topping liqueur.”

I looked at B——­’s compartment.  His servant, a sapper, was stowing the kit in the racks and under the seat, with the help of a portable acetylene lamp which burnt with a hard white light in the darkness, a darkness which you could almost feel with your hand.