AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel. For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these priests---
LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming.
AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me, I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you, and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road, and then--
62
THE GREAT GARRISONS
--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.
It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from one great garrison to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of all that Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the guns and the tramp of Épinal. I had left Épinal and counted the miles and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an army, the ungarnished gaps between.
As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the French line. The sun here and there glinted on the ends of rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song.
I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written up the words,