But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of both the French and British forces in the new won ground of the great offensive lay necessarily in the open.  Only the big guns and the advanced Red Cross stations had got into pits and subterranean hiding places.  The advance has been too rapid and continuous for the armies to make much of a toilette as they halted, and the destruction and the desolation of the country won afforded few facilities for easy concealment.  Tents, transport, munitions, these all indicated an army on the march—­at the rate of half a mile in a week or so, to Germany.  If the wet and mud of November and December have for a time delayed that advance, the force behind has but accumulated for the resumption of the thrust.

3

A journey up from the base to the front trenches shows an interesting series of phases.  One leaves Amiens, in which the normal life threads its way through crowds of resting men in khaki and horizon blue, in which staff officers in automobiles whisk hither and thither, in which there are nurses and even a few inexplicable ladies in worldly costume, in which restaurants and cafes are congested and busy, through which there is a perpetual coming and going of processions of heavy vans to the railway sidings.  One dodges past a monstrous blue-black gun going up to the British front behind two resolute traction engines—­the three sun-blistered young men in the cart that trails behind lounge in attitudes of haughty pride that would shame the ceiling gods of Hampton Court.  One passes through arcades of waiting motor vans, through arcades of waiting motor vans, through suburbs still more intensely khaki or horizon blue, and so out upon the great straight poplar-edged road—­to the front.  Sometimes one laces through spates of heavy traffic, sometimes the dusty road is clear ahead, now we pass a vast aviation camp, now a park of waiting field guns, now an encampment of cavalry.  One turns aside, and abruptly one is in France—­France as one knew it before the war, on a shady secondary road, past a delightful chateau behind its iron gates, past a beautiful church, and then suddenly we are in a village street full of stately Indian soldiers.

It betrays no military secret to say that commonly the rare tourist to the British offensive passes through Albert, with its great modern red cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt Madonna and Child that once surmounted the tower now, as everyone knows, hanging out horizontally in an attitude that irresistibly suggests an imminent dive upon the passing traveller.  One looks right up under it.

Presently we begin to see German prisoners.  The whole lot look entirely contented, and are guarded by perhaps a couple of men in khaki.  These German prisoners do not attempt to escape, they have not the slightest desire for any more fighting, they have done their bit, they say, honour is satisfied; they give remarkably little trouble.  A little way further on perhaps we pass their cage, a double barbed-wire enclosure with a few tents and huts within.