France at War | Page 9

of their business for that day.
Still higher up, on a narrow path among the trees, stood a priest and
three or four officers. They watched the battle and claimed the great
bursts of smoke for one side or the other, at the same time as they kept
an eye on the flickering aeroplane. "Ours," they said, half under their
breath. "Theirs." "No, not ours that one--theirs! . . . That fool is banking
too steep . . . That's Boche shrapnel. They always burst it high. That's
our big gun behind that outer hill . . . He'll drop his machine in the
street if he doesn't take care . . . There goes a trench-sweeper. Those
last two were theirs, but that"--it was a full roar --"was ours."

BEHIND THE GERMAN LINES
The valley held and increased the sounds till they seemed to hit our
hillside like a sea.
A change of light showed a village, exquisitely pencilled atop of a hill,
with reddish haze at its feet.
"What is that place?" I asked.
The priest replied in a voice as deep as an organ: "That is Saint------ It
is in the Boche lines. Its condition is pitiable."
The thunders and the smokes rolled up and diminished and renewed
themselves, but the small children romped up and down the old stone
steps; the beginner's aeroplane unsteadily chased its own shadow over
the fields; and the soldiers in billet asked the band for their favourite
tunes.
Said the lieutenant of local Guards as the cars went on:
"She--play--Tipperary."
And she did--to an accompaniment of heavy pieces in the hills, which
followed us into a town all ringed with enormous searchlights, French
and Boche together, scowling at each other beneath the stars.
. . . .
It happened about that time that Lord Kitchener with General Joffre
reviewed a French Army Corps.
We came on it in a vast dip of ground under grey clouds, as one comes
suddenly on water; for it lay out in misty blue lakes of men mixed with
darker patches, like osiers and undergrowth, of guns, horses, and
wagons. A straight road cut the landscape in two along its murmuring
front.
VETERANS OF THE WAR

It was as though Cadmus had sown the dragon's teeth, not in orderly
furrows but broadcast, till, horrified by what arose, he had emptied out
the whole bag and fled. But these were no new warriors. The record of
their mere pitched battles would have satiated a Napoleon. Their
regiments and batteries had learnt to achieve the impossible as a matter
of routine, and in twelve months they had scarcely for a week lost
direct contact with death. We went down the line and looked into the
eyes of those men with the used bayonets and rifles; the packs that
could almost stow themselves on the shoulders that would be strange
without them; at the splashed guns on their repaired wheels, and the
easy-working limbers. One could feel the strength and power of the
mass as one feels the flush of heat from off a sunbaked wall. When the
Generals' cars arrived there, there was no loud word or galloping about.
The lakes of men gathered into straight-edged battalions; the batteries
aligned a little; a squadron reined back or spurred up; but it was all as
swiftly smooth as the certainty with which a man used to the pistol
draws and levels it at the required moment. A few peasant women saw
the Generals alight. The aeroplanes, which had been skimming low as
swallows along the front of the line (theirs must have been a superb
view) ascended leisurely, and "waited on" like hawks. Then followed
the inspection, and one saw the two figures, tall and short, growing
smaller side by side along the white road, till far off among the cavalry
they entered their cars again, and moved along the horizon to another
rise of grey-green plain.
"The army will move across where you are standing. Get to a flank,"
some one said.
AN ARMY IN MOTION
We were no more than well clear of that immobile host when it all
surged forward, headed by massed bands playing a tune that sounded
like the very pulse of France.
The two Generals, with their Staff, and the French Minister for War,
were on foot near a patch of very green lucerne. They made about
twenty figures in all. The cars were little grey blocks against the grey
skyline. There was nothing else in all that great plain except the army;

no sound but the changing notes of the aeroplanes and the blunted
impression, rather than noise, of feet of men on soft ground. They came
over a slight ridge, so that one saw the curve of it first furred, then
grassed, with the