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