and there from this wire hung an electric-light bulb. It was a symbol of
the time, and the place, and the people. There was no local by-law to
forbid such a thing, or if there was, no one dreamt of obeying it.

Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion
and I, at guesswork to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which
is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely
ravines of Picardy which travellers never know (for they only see the
plains), and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the steep
bank from the valley on to the bare plateau above, but it was all at
random and all guesswork, only we wisely thought that we were nearing
the beginning of things, and that on the bare fields of the high flat we
should have a greater horizon and a better chance of catching any
indications of men or arms.

When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet
gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all
about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly
blue.

It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that
vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel
ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see up
to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups of
trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay
concealed a _corps d'armee_--and not to see or hear a soul. The
only human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very
slowly up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot
dead across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As
we went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men