Troops were being moved up. Groups of
them in goatskin coats, so that English Tommies looked like their
Viking ancestors, halted for a spell by the side of their stacked arms,
waiting for orders. Long lines of motor-lorries, with supplies to feed
the men and guns, narrowed the highway for traffic. Officers
approached our cars at every halt, saluted our staff officer, and asked
anxious questions: "How are things going? Is there any news?"
In the open country we could see the battle front, the low-lying
marshlands with windmills waving their arms on the far horizon, the
ridges and woods in which British and German batteries were
concealed, and the lines of trenches in which our men lay very close
to their enemy. We left the cars and, slithering in sticky mud, made
our way up a hillock on which one of these innumerable windmills
stood distinct. We were among the men who were in the actual
fighting lines and who went into the trenches turn and turn about, so
that it became the normal routine of their lives.
In the early days of the war these regiments had suffered heavy
losses, so that there were new drafts in them now, but there were
lads here who had fought at Mons and Charleroi and had seen their
comrades fall in heaps round about Le Cateau.
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