The Glory of The Coming

ntry in their impetuous onrush had so far outtravelled the heavy and more cumbersome arms of their service that the artillery

ot seem the part of wisdom for the four of us to go ahead in

language I knew I continued on until I came to the last two houses in the row. They overhung the riverbank. Beyond them were two bridges spanni

wheelbarrows and clustered household furniture, including many mattresses that plainly had been filched from the villagers' abandoned homes. Midway of the main bridge a handful of French engineers were pottering away, rather leisurely, I thought, at some

iform cap, for an American officer. That an American officer should be in this plac

this?" was my

giving to the name a literal rendition very differe

yonder on the bridg

they're goin' to give it another try. They'll be letting off the charge pretty soon, sir, I think-as soon as a fe

re the Germa

t be uncomfortably

sir, if you don't min

ee over a broken garden wall the British battery down below at the left, firing as fast as the gunners could serve the pieces

e spot where we halted came up to our middles. Acr

st," he said with the manner of a hired guide. "You carn't see them now, sir, but a bit ago I 'ad a peep at a couple o

id, like t

The imperturbable Tommy fell back in good order, but I think possibly I

of war. Any desire on the part of any one to stay and see what might happen after the bridge had been blown up was effectually squelched by the sudden appearance of two British officers coming

merged from hard fighting. Of a surety they would very shortly be engaged in more hard fighting, striving to prevent the on-moving Germans from crossing the river. Over their head shells from their own

tly as men engaged in some wearing but peaceful labour might behave during a nooning in a harvest field. No one in sight was crouching in a posture of defence, with his

e did so in level, unexcited tones. They might have been discussing the veriest commonplaces of life. For all I knew to the contrary, they were discussing commonplaces. The two British privates leaned upon the

serve to invest it with one-tenth of the drama that marked a hundred other sights we had that day witnessed. Later, though,

ed, thanks be to British desperation and French determination; and it was then, according to what students of strategy among the Allies say, that the hosts of the War Lord altered the plan of their campaign and

matter-of-fact young Royal Lancer. What followed thereafter was in the nature of a series of anticlimaxes, and yet we saw a bookful before we rode back to Soissons for a seco

to Compiègne the more numerous were the British, not in squads and detachments and bits of companies but in regiments and brigades which preserved their formations even though some of them had been reduced to skeletons of their former proportions. In the fields alongside the way the artillerymen were throwing up earthen banks for the guns; the infantrymen were making low sod walls b

self in cold ditch water. He had fought or marched all day, I imagine; his chances of being sent to eternity in piecemeal before another sunset were exceedingly good; but he would go, tidied

urse. A lone soldier of the Bedfordshires-a man near forty, I should say at an offhand guess-was tramping a

r way," explai

at us wh

educated man. "I've lost my own way no less than six times to-

y. We had come to a crossroads just back of a small village, when with a low spiteful hiss of escaping air one of our rear tires went flat. We stopped to replace the damaged tube with a better one. Be

ives, fired from an enemy mortar miles away, had dropped within seventy, sixty yards of us in a field; what seemed to happen was that a great plug was pulled out of the air with a smiting and a crashing

a nine shell exploding in one's immediate vicinity is a curious sinking sensation at the

eparted. Even so, I believe the world's record for pumping up tires was broken on this occas