Also it includes the art of making attractive models of guns, camps, trenches and the like that are not bona-fide guns, camps, or trenches at all, so that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the aeroplane observer may waste his time and energies and the enemy gunfire be misdirected.In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to deceive the very elect at a distance of a few thousand feet.The camouflage of concealment aims either at invisibility or imitation; I have seen a supply train look like a row of cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted up its sides.But that was a flight of the imagination; the commonest camouflage is merely to conceal.Trees are brought up and planted near the object to be hidden, it is painted in the same tones as its background, it is covered with an awning painted to look like grass or earth.I suppose it is only a matter of development before a dummy cow or so is put up to chew the cud on the awning.
But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of both the French and British forces in the new won ground of the great offensive lay necessarily in the open.Only the big guns and the advanced Red Cross stations had got into pits and subterranean hiding places.
The advance has been too rapid and continuous for the armies to make much of a toilette as they halted, and the destruction and the desolation of the country won afforded few facilities for easy concealment.Tents, transport, munitions, these all indicated an army on the march--at the rate of half a mile in a week or so, to Germany.If the wet and mud of November and December have for a time delayed that advance, the force behind has but accumulated for the resumption of the thrust.
3
A journey up from the base to the front trenches shows an interesting series of phases.One leaves Amiens, in which the normal life threads its way through crowds of resting men in khaki and horizon blue, in which staff officers in automobiles whisk hither and thither, in which there are nurses and even a few inexplicable ladies in worldly costume, in which restaurants and cafes are congested and busy, through which there is a perpetual coming and going of processions of heavy vans to the railway sidings.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.
Presently we begin to see German prisoners.The whole lot look entirely contented, and are guarded by perhaps a couple of men in khaki.These German prisoners do not attempt to escape, they have not the slightest desire for any more fighting, they have done their bit, they say, honour is satisfied; they give remarkably little trouble.A little way further on perhaps we pass their cage, a double barbed-wire enclosure with a few tents and huts within.
A string of covered waggons passes by.I turn and see a number of men sitting inside and looking almost as cheerful as a beanfeast in Epping Forest.the make facetious gestures.They have a subdued sing-song going on.But one of them looks a little sick, and then I notice not very obtrusive bandages.
"Sitting-up cases," my guide explains.
These are part of the casualties of last night's fight.
The fields on either side are now more evidently in the war zone.
The array of carts, the patches of tents, the coming and going of men increases.But here are three women harvesting, and presently in a cornfield are German prisoners working under one old Frenchman.Then the fields become trampled again.Here is a village, not so very much knocked about, and passing through it we go slowly beside a long column of men going up to the front.
We scan their collars for signs of some familiar regiment.These are new men going up for the first time; there is a sort of solemn elation in many of their faces.
The men coming down are usually smothered in mud or dust, and unless there has been a fight they look pretty well done up.
They stoop under their equipment, and some of the youngsters drag.One pleasant thing about this coming down is the welcome of the regimental band, which is usually at work as soon as the men turn off from the high road.I hear several bands on the British front; they do much to enhance the general cheerfulness.
On one of these days of my tour I had the pleasure of seeing the ---th Blankshires coming down after a fight.As we drew near Isaw that they combined an extreme muddiness with an unusual elasticity.They all seemed to be looking us in the face instead of being too fagged to bother.Then I noticed a nice grey helmet dangling from one youngster's bayonet, in fact his eye directed me to it.A man behind him had a black German helmet of the type best known in English illustrations; then two more grey appeared.
