_Monday, --th._--To-day, in nine hours, three divisions were rushed through this town for the ---- sector. They came in motor-'buses. At twelve miles an hour they tore through the astonished streets, which got themselves cleared quickly enough. The military police tried to restrain the pace. They were French 'buses driven by Frenchmen who had got a fever of excited speed in their blood. They cleared the military police off the route with impatient gestures, as one waves aside an impertinence.... This is mobility. Feverish processions of this kind are altogether apart from battalions marching, cavalry clattering, engineers lumbering. A fifteen-inch gun, distributed over five steam tractors, goes through at midnight with flares and clamour. One trusts that such engines offer compensation for their unwieldiness, for that is incredible: five gigantic tractors _with_ trailers, to move one of them at this strident snail's pace. The nine-point-two's are accommodated each on one tractor. The field-guns, tossed on to waggons, hurry through, toys by comparison. _Tuesday, --th._--I was on the ---- Road this morning in the gusty drizzle. A column of artillery was moving towards ----. It was miserable weather for horsed-transport. All the men had wry-necks, with the list against the wind. The flanks of the officers' horses were overspread by the voluminous waterproof cape. At ---- there was a horse column encamped. Nothing could appear more miserable than the dejected horse lines in the sea of mud--manes and draggle-tails blown about in the murk. A party of ineligible Frenchmen were road-patching near ----. The main roads have them at work always. They fill the holes and minute valleys that military traffic makes continuously. Lorry-holes are insidious things. They magnify at an astonishing rate if left for two days. They must be treated at once. The gangs move up and down the roads with mobile loads of earth and gravel, treating all the depressions and maintaining a surface tolerable for Colonels' cars. (You can judge the freight of a car by its speed; the pace of Majors is slightly less fierce than that of Colonels. Brigadiers make it killing.) The road-menders get in where they can between the flights. It's a disjointed business, and a mucky one, this weather. A Colonel's car-wheels spurt into the green fields. The gangers get mottled with the thin brown fluid. They are a pathetically decrepit folk--men too old or infirm for the trenches and boys who are too young. But this work, in this weather, carries a test almost as severe as that of trench-warfare.