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Updated: June 18, 2025
These officers think about their arriving trains, and about emptying them in the shortest space of time; and they think about their motor-lorries and the condition thereof; and they pass their lives in checking lists and in giving receipts for things and taking receipts for things. Their honour may be in a receipt. And all this is the very basis of war.
The inhabitants of Bethune the shopkeepers, and brave little families of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines, and harlots came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and watched the British army pouring through battalions of Londoners and Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by hard-mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances, empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after day.
I was sent round to a place, the name of which I cannot remember, to a certain division; then I struck north along a straight road through the forest to Villers-Cotterets. The town was crammed with French motor-lorries and crowded with French troops, who greeted me hilariously as I rode through to Véze.
She was struck by the profound instinctive wisdom just enunciated by the girl. "Well," she said, "I shall see. I've not made up my mind yet. What's the young man doing this afternoon, by the way?" "He's gone to Birmingham to try to sell two motor-lorries. He won't be back home till late. He's coming over here to-morrow."
The Frankfurter Zeitung, July 31st, gives Bethmann-Hollweg and the Chief of the General Staff the lie direct. The paragraph is dated July 30th, Kolmar, and runs: "The Schlucht Pass has just been barricaded by German frontier guards. This is to prevent motor-lorries and such-like vehicles from entering French territory without our permission. The report is an absolute invention.
I soothed the old man down by pointing out I was to go working these lorries, and the British Army don't shoot Germans with motor-lorries; and I'd be able to keep him posted in any weak points, if, and as, and when they developed, so he could keep ahead o' the crowd in improvements and hooking in more fat contracts; and lastly, that the Schmidt customer crowd didn't need to know a thing about me being here unless he was dub enough to tell 'em.
But the messenger was due at three, at the hunting-lodge in, the mountains which was his destination. He would be, at the best, late by an hour. He pushed the car to its limit. The fine hard road, with its border of trees, stretched ahead. Nikky surveyed it with a soldier's eye. A military road, or he knew nothing one along which motor-lorries could make express time.
"K.," said I, as we removed our cumbrous headgear, "about how much do you suppose these things weigh?" "Fully a ton!" he answered, jerking his cap over his eyes and scowlingly accepting a cigarette. Very soon the shattered village was far behind and we were threading a devious course between huge steam-tractors, guns, motor-lorries and more guns.
Our railway train and the policeman had carried us over endless farmlands, through forests, beside rivers, before we noticed, drawn up along the side of a quarter of a mile of road, an endless procession of big grey motor-lorries. Every one was exactly like the next a tall grey hood in front and a long grey tarpaulin behind. It was the first sign of the front.
Rows of grey motor-lorries and omnibuses do not lend themselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, and spitting and spurting motor-cycles and "torpedo" racers are no substitute for the glitter of helmets and the curvetting of chargers; but once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines and the neutral tints of the new warfare, the scene in that crowded clattering square becomes positively brilliant.
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