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Through the open windows one caught glimpses of rows of poplar-trees and the countryside lying cool and white in the moonlight. Then came stations with sentries, stray soldiers hunting for a place to squeeze in, and now and then empty troop-trains jolted by, smelling of horses.
And now they were serving the men from the troop-trains that kept pouring up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who could hobble over from the hospital trains that as steadily kept pouring down. Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when the locomotive unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful of noisy men go galloping away, leaving a laugh and a few sous behind.
Troop-trains were rolling right up to the quay and disgorging hundreds of men, spruce in their tropical kit of new yellow drill and pith helmets. Unattached officers arrived singly or in pairs; in carriages or on foot. Many of them were doctors, who were being drafted to the East in large numbers.
It was down to Munkacs, through Silesia and the Tatras, that the troop-trains came in April while snow was still deep in the Carpathians. Now it was a feeding-station for fresh troops going up and wounded and prisoners coming down.
It added the information that three troop-trains with nine engines were to pass through the village that night on their way to the trenches, and that the trains were due at the junction at nine o'clock or shortly thereafter. The mairie was on the other side of the street from the estaminet.
All day long crowded troop-trains had been steaming into the station, where small pilot engines waited to receive them and drag them, groaning and squealing, round the curves and across the points that lead to the docks. The first train arrived at about nine, and the last at two. Between those hours there was a constant succession of trains.
Companies of Yeomanry used to arrive, and leave for destinations with enticing names that smelt of war, and night after night rollicking snatches of "Soldiers of the Queen" would float across the valley from the troop-trains, as they climbed the pass northward. As early as April 15th, the word went round that we were under orders to go to Bloemfontein "as soon as transport could be ready for us."
Immense illuminations of paper lanterns, lettered with phrases of loyalty or patriotic cheer, celebrated the success of the imperial arms, or gladdened the eyes of soldiers going by train to the field. In Kobe, constantly traversed by troop-trains, such illuminations continued night after night for weeks together; and the residents of each street further subscribed for flags and triumphal arches.
There was a certain stench, too, the smell of horse-fouled mud that mixed with that odor I later was able to classify as the smell of war. For the war has a smell that clings to everything miltary, fills the troop-trains, hospitals, and cantonments, and saturates one's own clothing, a smell compounded of horse, chemicals, sweat, mud, dirt, and human beings.
And people had been so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an effect of positive relief. Section 2 The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they were intended to entrench themselves.
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