We were wet and tired and cold and hungry, for we had left the train miles back of the firing-line and had been marching through the rain since early morning; but, as the sergeant said, "A bloke standin' by the side o' the road, watchin' this 'ere column pass, would think we was a-go'n' to a Sunday-school picnic." The roads were filled with endless processions of singing, shouting soldiers. Seen from a distance the long columns gave the appearance of imposing strength. One thought of them as battalions, brigades, divisions, cohesive parts of a great fighting machine. But when our lines of march crossed, when we halted to make way for each other, what an absorbing pageant of personality! Each rank was a series of intimate pictures. Everywhere there was laughing, singing, a merry minstrelsy of mouth-organs.
The jollity in my own part of the line was doubtless a picture in little of what was happening elsewhere. We were anticipating the exciting times just at hand. Mac, who was blown to pieces by a shell a few hours later, was dancing in and out of the ranks singing,—
"Oh! Won't it be joyful!
Oh! Won't it be joyful!"
Preston, who was killed at the same time, threw his rifle in the air and caught it again in sheer excess of animal spirits. Three rollicking lads, all of whom we buried during the week in the same shell hole under the same wooden cross, stumbled with an exaggerated show of utter weariness singing,—
"We never knew till now how muddy mud is,
We never knew how muddy mud could be."
And little Charley Harrison, who had fibbed bravely about his age to the recruiting officers, trudged contentedly along, his rifle slung jauntily over his shoulder, and munched army biscuit with all the relish of an old campaigner. Several days later he said good-bye to us, and made the journey back the same road, this time in a motor ambulance; and as I write, he is hobbling about a London hospital ward, one trouser leg pathetically empty.
I remember that march in the light of our later experiences, in the light of the official report of the total British casualties at Loos: sixty thousand British lads killed, wounded, and missing. Marching four abreast, a column of casualties miles in length. I see them plodding light-heartedly through the mud as they did on that gray September day, their faces wet with the rain, "an' a bloke standin' by the side of the road would think they was a-go'n' to a Sunday-school picnic."
The sergeant was in a talkative mood.