he was up the wide steps, the glass doors had closed on him, and I
stood there in the pitch-black night, suddenly unable to believe
that I was I, or Chalons Chalons, or that a young man
who in Paris drops in to dine with me and talk over new books and
plays, had been whispering a password in my ear to carry me
unchallenged to a house a few streets away! The sense of unreality
produced by that one word was so overwhelming that for a blissful
moment the whole fabric of what I had been experiencing, the whole
huge and oppressive and unescapable fact of the war, slipped away
like a torn cobweb, and I seemed to see behind it the reassuring
face of things as they used to be.

The next morning dispelled that vision. We woke to a noise of guns
closer and more incessant than even the first night's cannonade at
Verdun; and when we went out into the streets it seemed as if,
overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground. Waylaid at one
corner after another by the long tide of troops streaming out
through the town to the northern suburbs, we saw in turn all the
various divisions of the unfolding frieze: first the infantry and
artillery, the sappers and miners, the endless trains of guns and
ammunition, then the long line of grey supply-waggons, and finally
the stretcher-bearers following the Red Cross ambulances. All the
story of a day's warfare was written in the spectacle of that
endless silent flow to the front: and we were to read it again, a
few days later, in the terse announcement of "renewed activity"
about Suippes, and of the bloody strip of ground gained between
Perthes and Beausejour.