One dodges past a monstrous blue-black gun going
up to the British front behind two resolute traction engines--the
three sun-blistered young men in the cart that trails behind lounge in
attitudes of haughty pride that would shame the ceiling gods of Hampton
Court. One passes through arcades of waiting motor vans, through arcades
of waiting motor vans, through suburbs still more intensely khaki or
horizon blue, and so out upon the great straight poplar-edged road--to
the front. Sometimes one laces through spates of heavy traffic,
sometimes the dusty road is clear ahead, now we pass a vast aviation
camp, now a park of waiting field guns, now an encampment of cavalry.
One turns aside, and abruptly one is in France--France as one knew it
before the war, on a shady secondary road, past a delightful chateau
behind its iron gates, past a beautiful church, and then suddenly we are
in a village street full of stately Indian soldiers.
It betrays no military secret to say that commonly the rare tourist to
the British offensive passes through Albert, with its great modern red
cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt Madonna and Child
that once surmounted the tower now, as everyone knows, hanging out
horizontally in an attitude that irresistibly suggests an imminent dive
upon the passing traveller. One looks right up under it.
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