Headquarters take tragedy in war with a strange ease, partly because it is their duty to check emotion, partly because they have to handle affairs as a problem in the void, and to forget the too human reactions of peril; partly because they have grown too familiar with an evil situation, if that situation has arisen gradually and enforced itself; partly because instruction, and the habit of a cultured class, has taught them how futile in such a pass is any waste of energy upon grieving. In the billets and posts around, the polyglot gossip at the camp fires and hearths, where sergeants saw to the cooking of the common meals, was less restrained; and in Welsh, and in the Saxon or nearly English phrases, in the rare French, in the mingled speech of the men from the sea coast, there was a note always of gloom and sometimes of alarm. Though the solid organization of the sergeants saw to it that the muttering should not spread too far, there could be no mistaking the temper of the troops. They knew, by that curious unexplained process through which the common soldier absorbs a position which he could not understand from a map, that things were desperate. But around the king’s table a much clearer appreciation of the peril led to no corresponding words, nor would any stranger present have imagined, from the tone of that room, how close and apparently inevitable was disaster. The little force had now been in retreat, and rapid retreat, from the failure before Paris, through one feverish week, pounding up northward for Calais; not with forced marches, indeed, but with full days’ marches. Now, at the end of that effort, it found itself headed off. The long, straight, marshy trench of the Somme lay between them and their Channel transports home. They had attempted its crossing a first, a second, a third time, and every attempt had been thrust back. They had felt down river with increasing anxiety, as the host upon the farther bank grew; and, while they had failed to make the crossing good, and while, as they were thus impelled northward, the breadth of the valley which defied them increased. Here they were at last at Boismont, on the lower estuary, with a huge sea tide swirling back and forth, at its height--a mile and a half of deep tumbling water--twice the depth that would drown a man. At its lowest it became a mass of marsh and mud, through which the hurrying ebb ran tumbling to the sea in varied channels. Boismont stood upon the eastern bank of that broad water flank, grouped upon the dry steep above the edge of the marsh and the mud. There were rumours of some available passage, but no one caught sight of it, and even were it known, what chance had the army of forcing a long and narrow and perilous traverse when they had been unable to force the short bridges of the upper stream?