CHAPTER I
BEHIND THE LINES—I
The road between —— and —— is a fearful and wonderful place in the swift-closing winter evening. The early winter rains are drifting gustily across it. The last of the autumn leaves are whirling away. The far western valley is a gulf of mist; the rain-squalls wash about its slopes.
The road beneath you, between its low flanks, is a channel of mobile black slush, too far churned for striation. Ever since the rains began, two weeks ago, there has been a traffic on it that is continuous—a traffic that has had to be directed and disentangled at innumerable stages along its length. So the road surface (it washes over a solid foundation) is a squirting slime.
The motor-lorry is the vehicle par excellence. The wonder is how it is supplied and maintained at this rate. In most villages is a tyre-press where its wheels are re-rubbered as often as need be—and begad! that's often enough to keep a large and noble army of mechanics hard-worked. Any day you can see the old tyre being prised off and the new, smooth, full, blue one pushed on. The old is like nothing so much as a rim of Gruyère cheese, with the perforations clean through to the rim, everywhere. The question that always occurs is: Did the lorry run to the last on a tyre like that? The answer is: Yes—had to.
The motor-lorry it is, then, that monopolises the road. There is a stream of them passing either way which is not quite constant, but is nearly so. Lorries are almost as thick as the trees that line every road in France.
Between these honking, rumbling streams, and in the gaps of them, other traffic goes as it can—that is, Colonel's cars, motor-cycles (there are almost as many cycles as lorries; but they can pant an intermittent course through any maze), motor-ambulances, tractors. There are French Colonels, English Colonels, mere Majors, and even Generals, threading impatiently through the maze. It is obviously aggravating to them, this snail's pace. A Colonel likes to tear along, because he is a Colonel. One is speaking now of a main road between railheads. Put them on a side-road, where there is nothing in sight but a few ambulances, a lorry or two, and some cows and women, and they move at a pace that inspires an adequate respect in all who have to stand aside for their necks' sake.
But in this horde of beastly lorries what can a Colonel do, more than glare and gnaw a rain-dewed moustache? There are supply lorries, ammunition lorries, Flying Corps lorries, road-repairing lorries, lorries bearing working-parties, freights of German prisoners, lorries returning empty. Beside, there are always a few 'buses moving troops, and sometimes, participating in the general mêlée, is a troop of cavalry or a half-mile of artillery limbers or a divisional train of horse transport—or all three—making an adequate contribution to the creaking, rattling, lumbering, panting, honking, shouting, cursing, squelching, bobbing, swaying, dodging throng. A military highroad in France behind the line, any time in the day or night, baffles description—especially if it's raining.
Conceive (if you can) what this becomes at ten o'clock at night in an advanced section of the road where lights would be suicidal. But I doubt if you can—no, not unless you've been in the whirl of it.
Far the pleasanter journey you'll have by boarding your motor-lorry on a fine summer morning. The country smiles all about you. Smile is the only word. You catch the infection of green bank, green plain flecked with brown and gold stubble and streaked with groves of elm and beech, poplar and plane: you get infected and rejoice. If you climb the crest of one of the slopes less gentle than most slopes here, you may look down on it all—on the double line of trees setting-off here and there across the plains, up the slopes, down the valleys, marking the roads, of which trees are the invariable index; at the winding stream, banked with hop and willow, flowing through a belt of richer greenness: that's how you know a stream from a height—not by the water, of which you see nothing for the groves that border it, but by the irregularity of these plantations (the roads are planted with a deliberate symmetry) and the deepening in the colour of the lush grasses of the basin.