Fortunately for the First Division, it had had some able bilingual forerunners at the seaport town where they landed. The camps had been built by the French, a few miles back from the town, but a few of the housekeeping necessities had been installed by General Pershing's staff-officers, and signs in good, plain English showed the proper roads. And as the single files of soldiers began to descend the gang-plank of the first transport, and to form for marching to camp, their own officers were having some compact instruction from the staff-officers on how to get to camp and what to do when they got there. There was no waste motion about getting the troops under way. The first companies were tramp-tramping up the streets before the last companies were overside, and the first transport was free to go back and give place to the next one before the mayor had got his red sash and gilt chains in place and arrived to do them suitable honor. So, while the shore watchers fell back into safe observation-posts, the soldiers clattered down through the quay-sheds to the little street, formed and swung away, and one ship after another disgorged its passengers, and presently the sheds were overrun with the blue-clad sailors from the convoys. All that day, the soldiers marched through the town. Their camps lay at the end of a long white shore road, and jobs were not wanting when they got there. Their pace was easy, because of these things, and they probably would not have put out any French eye with their flawless marching, even under less indulgent circumstances. For this First Division was recruited in a hurry, and most of their real training lay ahead of them. Where they were impressive was in their composite build. There were little fellows among them, but they straggled at the back. The major part of the soldiers were tall, thin, rangy-looking, with a march that was more lope than anything else and a look of heaving their packs along without much effort. They fell about midway between the thin, breedy look of the first English troops in France and the stocky, thick-necked sort that came later. The marines were the pick of the lot, for size and behavior too. The sense of being something special was with the marines from the first. They marched that way. And, set apart by their olive drab as well as by their size and comportment, they gave that First Division's first march in France a quality of real distinction. And when the army got to its first French camps, the welcome sight its eyes first fell upon was that of already arrived marines carrying water down the hill. The camps were long wooden buildings, rather above the average, as became the status of the visitors, built almost at the top of a hill, looking down over green fields and round trees to the three or four villages within range of vision, and beyond them to the sea.