The files plodded on each side of the tumbled track, and as they neared Somme-Py a pitiful stream of traffic grew and passed between them, the tide of French wounded ebbing to the rear. They were the débris of the attacks that had spent themselves through the day—walking wounded, drifting back like shadows in stained blue uniforms, men who staggered and leaned against each other and spoke in low, racked voices to the passing files; and broken men who were borne in stretchers, moaning—“Ah, Jesu!...” “Doucement, doucement!!...” Farther back the ambulances would be waiting for them.... The battalion went on in close-mouthed silence. Very little talking now, no laughing at all.... “El Capitan, regardez—we be sober-minded men approaching—what we approach—” said the second-in-command, hitching the sling of his musette bag well out of the way of his gas-mask. “I have always,” replied that stolid veteran, “held that war was a serious business.” ... “This is Somme-Py. Can’t those bums ahead set a better pace?” The column went quickly through the town, into which shells were falling, stumbling over the débris of ruined walls and houses. There was a very busy French dressing-station there, under the relic of a church. It was too dark to see, but each man caught the sound and the smell of it. They cleared the town and went on to a crossroads. French guides were to have met the battalion there, for the line was just ahead, but the guides were late. There was a nerve-racking halt. The next battalion in column closed up; a machine-gun outfit, with its solemn, blasé mules, jammed into the rifle companies. The 49th was the leading company, just behind the Battalion Headquarters group, and the second-in-command went up to where the major and his satellites were halted. “Crossroads are always a dam’ bad business, Coxy,” the major was observing to his adjutant. “Just askin’ for it here—no tellin’ how late our Frog friends will be—get the men moved into that ditch off the road yonder—Ah! thought so!”