And far away the road was growing longer and longer amidst, as always, desolation and thunder.  And one day far away from X the road grew very fine indeed.  It was going proudly through a mighty city, sweeping in like a river; you would not think that it ever remembered duck-boards.  There were great palaces there, with huge armorial eagles blazoned in stone, and all along each side of the road was a row of statues of kings.  And going down the road towards the palace, past the statues of the kings, a tired procession was riding, full of the flags of the Allies.  And I looked at the flags in my dream, out of national pride to see whether we led, or whether France or America.  America went before us, but I could not see the Union Jack in the van nor the Tricolour either, nor the Stars and Stripes:  Belgium led and then Serbia, they that had suffered most.

And before the flags, and before the generals, I saw marching along on foot the ghosts of the working party that were killed at X, gazing about them in admiration as they went, at the great city and at the palaces.  And one man, wondering at the Sièges Allée, turned round to the Lance Corporal in charge of the party:  ``That is a fine road that we made, Frank,’’ he said.

An Imperial Monument

It is an early summer’s morning:  the dew is all over France:  the train is going eastwards.  They are quite slow, those troop trains, and there are few embankments or cuttings in those flat plains, so that you seem to be meandering along through the very life of the people.  The roads come right down to the railways, and the sun is shining brightly over the farms and the people going to work along the roads, so that you can see their faces clearly as the slow train passes them by.

They are all women and boys that work on the farms; sometimes perhaps you see a very old man, but nearly always women and boys; they are out working early.  They straighten up from their work as we go by and lift their hands to bless us.

We pass by long rows of the tall French poplars, their branches cut away all up the trunk, leaving only an odd round tuft at the top of the tree; but little branches are growing all up the trunk now, and the poplars are looking unkempt.  It would be the young men who would cut the branches of the poplars.  They would cut them for some useful thrifty purpose that I do not know; and then they would cut them because they were always cut that way, as long ago as the times of the old men’s tales about France; but chiefly, I expect, because youth likes to climb difficult trees; that is why they are clipped so very high.  And the trunks are all unkempt now.

We go on by many farms with their shapely red-roofed houses; they stand there, having the air of the homes of an ancient people; they would not be out of keeping with any romance that might come, or any romance that has come in the long story of France, and the girls of those red-roofed houses work all alone in the fields.