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We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind's eye even in the darkness of an Amiens night the vastness of the human energy which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more food and more shells, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching forward from back roads to the front, from which many would never come marching back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare horses, along hundreds of miles of roads all the machinery of slaughter on the move.
All the scenes, incidents, persons of the preceding days were flowing in one continuous medley through the Squire's mind the great spectacle of the back of the Army, with all its endless movement, its crowded roads and marching men, the hovering aeroplanes, the camouflaged guns, the long trains of artillery waggons and motor-lorries, strange faces of Kaffir boys and Chinese, grey lines of German prisoners.
Their great labour over, and their sacrifices buried, they have come out this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make delirious noises with comic instruments. Their heroic thoughts are blattering through penny trumpets.
The motor-lorries constitute the difficulty, not always because they are a size too large for the country, but sometimes because of the human nature of Tommies. The rule is that on each motor-lorry two Tommies shall ride in front and one behind.
It was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and sticks these soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our front-lines, were trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks, ambulances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, agricultural implements, transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A. tents, gun-horse and mule columns, while rear-guard actions were being fought within gunfire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back along the roads in this uproar of traffic, and word came that a further retreat was happening and that the enemy had broken through again...
At the side of it were glutinous morasses about six feet in width, and sixteen inches deep. I started off with two 2nd Corps motor-cyclists. There was an almost continuous line of transport on the road motor-lorries that did not dare deviate an inch from the centre of the road for fear of slipping into the mire, motor ambulances, every kind of transport, and some infantry battalions.
As the main road was forbidden to our ambulances there was an excited discussion as a result of which we separated: the vehicles to go in search of a by-way, and we, the pedestrians, to skirt the roads on which long lines of motor-lorries, coming and going, passed each other in haste like the carriages of an immense train.
Then after making our way through roads lined interminably, as on the previous day, with the splendid motor-lorries laden with food and ammunition, which have made such a new thing of the transport of this war, interspersed with rows of ambulances and limbered wagons, with flying-stations and horse lines, we climbed a hill to one of the finest positions in this northern land; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, Frank and Fleming, English and French have clashed, which looks out northward towards the Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards Ypres.
He sprayed out in beneficent streams from his rail-head tons of stuff every day. Every day he sent out two hundred and eighty bags of postal matter to the men beyond. The polish on the metallic portions of his numerous motor-lorries was uncanny. You might lift a bonnet and see the bright parts of the engine glittering like the brass of a yacht. Dandyism of the Army Service Corps!
You cannot go far without encountering, not one or two, but dozens and scores of motor-lorries, which, after the leviathan manner of motor-lorries, occupy as much of the road as they can.
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