When the enemy left he blew up all the cross-roads and made many mine-craters along the way of his retreat. They have scarcely checked us at all, and a tribute of praise is due to our infantry and our labour battalions, who have been repairing those roads with quick, untiring industry. To-day I have met with much traffic of war, French as well as British traffic, the men in blue marching by the men in brown through country where both armies meet. The French soldiers were marching with their bands and colours through the ruined villages, and I never saw more splendid men even in the early days of the war, when the great armies of France went forward with a kind of religious passion and flung back the Germans from the Marne. Our own men had no bands and no colours. There was not the same sense of drama as they passed, but these clean-shaven boys of ours, hardened by foul weather, by frost, and rain-storms, and blizzard, go forward into the great waste, which the enemy had left behind him, in their usual matter-of-fact way, whistling a tune or two, passing a whimsical word along the line, settling down to any old job that comes in a day's work, and finding as much comfort as they can at the end of a long day's march on the lee side of a shell-broken wall. III THE ABANDONED COUNTRY MARCH 24 After long days of tiring adventure in the wake of the German rear-guards, following through places only just evacuated, and tramping through the great ruin they have left behind them, I have tried to give some idea of the tragic drama of it all, the uncanny quietude of the abandoned country, the frightful wreckage of towns and villages destroyed, not by shell-fire, but by picks and axes and firebrands, the deep mine-craters blown under roads, the broken bridges across the Somme, the crowds of starved civilians surrounding our patrols in market squares where they had been herded while their homes were in flames around them, the little bodies of British troops advancing through barbed-wire entanglements into fortress positions like Bapaume and Péronne, and our cavalry patrols feeling their way forward into unknown country where the enemy's rear-guards are in hiding. That, in a few lines, is the historical picture of this strange new phase of warfare in which we have been pushing forward during the past two weeks. But through it all, to me, an onlooker of these things, there has been one special theme of interest. It is the revelation of the German way of life behind his lines--these abundant lines--his military methods of defence and observation and organization, and the domestic arrangements by which he has tried to make himself comfortable in the field of war. Along every step of the way by which he has retreated there are relics which show us exactly how our enemies lived and fought when they were hidden from us across No Man's Land, and their philosophy of life in war. All that is worth a little study.