Towards evening soldiers arrived. From all sides they flowed towards
the station. Deep-voiced non-coms. ran in front of the files. They
were stemming the tide of men and massing them along the barriers or
in railed squares--pretty well everywhere. The men piled their arms,
dropped their knapsacks, and not being free to go out, waited,
buried side by side in shadow.

The arrivals followed each other in volume that grew as the twilight
deepened. Along with the troops, the motors flowed up, and soon
there was an unbroken roar. Limousines glided through an enormous
sea of lorries, little, middling, and big. All these cleared aside,
wedged themselves in, subsided in their appointed places. A vast hum
of voices and mingled noises arose from the ocean of men and
vehicles that beat upon the approaches to the station and began in
places to filter through.

"That's nothing yet," said Cocon, The Man of Figures. "At Army Corps
Headquarters alone there are thirty officers' motors; and you don't
know," he added, "how many trains of fifty trucks it takes to
entrain all the Corpsmen and all the box of tricks--except, of
course, the lorries, that'll join the new sector on their feet?
Don't guess, fiat-face. It takes ninety."

"Great Scott! And there are thirty-three Corps?"

"There are thirty-nine, lousy one!"

The turmoil increases; the station becomes still more populous. As
far as the eye can make out a shape or the ghost of a shape, there
is a hurly-burly of movement as lively as a panic. All the hierarchy