The Glory of The Coming

of four, travelling in our own little tin flivverette, were just leaving Blérincourt, being bound still fart

by its massive empty walls and its tottering ruin of a gateway to the fury which laid hold on the peasants of these parts in the days of the Terror; and, third, Blérincourt, the model colony of model cottages, which for us held the most personal interest, since it was here

varnishing. Before us, within a space of time and distance to be spanned by not more than half an hour of steady riding, was somewhere the problematical doorway through which we hoped to pass into the forward lines of tha

e route was marked for us by signs and sounds without number, plainer than any mileposts could have been: By the columns of Frenchmen hurrying up to reenforce the decimated British who until now, at odds of one to five, had borne the buffets of the tremendous German onslaught; by the never-ending, never-slackening roar of the heavy guns; by the cloud of dust and powder, forming a wall against two sides of

delivery vans, carriages and private automobiles, this vast caravansary was made up of soldiers afoot, soldiers mounted and soldiers riding; of batteries, horse drawn and motor drawn; of pontoon bridges in segments; of wagon trains, baggage trains, provision trains and munition trains; of field t

and donkeys and mules of all the known sizes and colours; there were so many human shapes in uniforms of horizon blue that the eye grew wear

s and none to turn us back. Where the dust hung especially thick at a crossroads set in the midst of the wide plain we almost struck three pedestrians who seemingly did not heed our hooted warning or take notice of it until we were right upon them. As they jumped nimbly for the ditch we could s

ew her wide open and darted into the fog, to take temporary shelter behind a huge supply wagon

d across a field over a course parallel to the one we were taking and who disappeared in a hazel copse beyond. Rifle firing could be heard somewhere on the far side of the thicket. At a barked command from an officer who clattered up on horseback a battery of th

, all with their short noses pointing at precisely the same angle, like bird dogs on a back stand. Suddenly they did what well-broken bird dogs never do-they barked, one after the other. Almost before

we could have touched the artillerymen piling heaps of projectiles in convenient hollows in the earth close up to the edges of the road. Big covered wains discharged dusty infantrymen, who, pausing only long enough to unbuckle their packs from their shoulders and throw them under the hoods of the wagons, went at a shambling half-trot throu

vigour from the vaster panorama of which it was a part. What I had seen of battle formations in the preceding three weeks had made me think mainly of subway diggin's or of construction work for a new railroad or of engineering operations in connection with a dam, say, or a dike. What I saw no

, we had been seeking-the place where the most westerly sector of the French left wing touched the most easterly sector of the British right wing; and better than that, the place where the French strength hurrying up to re?nforce and if need be replace decimated divisions of their allies was joined on to and fused in with the retiring British Army

he British retreat. A retreat of sorts it may have been, but a rout it most assuredly was not. We saw companies reduced to the strength of ten or twelve or twenty men under command of noncommissioned officers or possibly of a single lieutenant. We saw individual privates and we saw privates in squads of two or three or half a dozen men, wh

ore lead into the living tidal wave of grey coats. Some that we overtook were singing, and singing lustily too. Than this no man could ask to see a finer spectacle of fortitude, of pluck and of discipline, and I am sure that in his heart each one of us, while having no doubt of the outcome of the fiery test, prayed that our own soldiers, when their time of trial by battle came, might under reverses and under punishment acquit thems

en called upon to endure during four days and five nights. We knew as surely as though we had stopped to take down the story of each one of the wearied, cheerful, resolute chaps, that they had their fill of kill

e started that I have in me now contempt not only for death but for life too. I thought last year o

ugout-was in the side of a hill with a wide sweep of lowland below and beyond us, and it was here in this valley that the Germans came at our people. Between

ontal attack against our trenches, but even the Germans, driven on as they must have been like cattle to the slaughter, couldn't stand what they got there. Within two hours they charg

next day, which was the day before yesterday, they worked their way round to the south a bit and tried a flanking advance. Then it was I saw this, just as I'm telling it t

scrambling up among the bodies-and they slid down on the other side and ran right into the wire entanglements, where those of them that were killed

ers-what were left of them-to fall back too. They were Scotchmen, these laddies, and they were fairly mad with the fighting. They didn't want to go, and they refus

coals of the wood

ar such as this one has been or another battle such as the one that still goes on yonder. 'Tis n

uctance or of surcease. We realised as thoroughly as though we had been eyewitnesses to their conduct that they had carried on like brave men; and without being told we re

ies of men passing through. Those men stood in midroad giving their orders as calmly and as crisply as though they had been bobbies on the Strand. Even this emergency John Bull's military system did not disintegrate. As long as the organism lasted the organisation would las

malignant thoroughness had felled before their big retreat of twelve months before. The place had been an orchard once. Now it was merely so much waste land, dedicated to uselessness by efficiency and kultur. The trees, as we could see, had not been blown dow

as a group of empty and shattered cottages stretching along a single narrow street that ran almost due north and south. Coming opposite the foot of this street we glimpsed at the other end of it a glint of running water, and in the same instant, perhaps two or three miles aw

awling mass of larv?. Over it puffs of smoke, white for shrapnel and black for explosives, were bursting. We were too far away to observe the effect of this shelling, but knew that the crawlin