The column had taken the road at daybreak, and this meant that the men had to be on parade a full quarter-hour before, had to turn out of their uncomfortable billets and sleeping-places an hour and a half before the time to parade. In that time they had to pack their kits (a quick enough and simple job, to be sure), put on their wet boots, water and feed their horses, eat a biscuit-and-cheese breakfast, scramble for a ‘lick and a promise’ sort of wash, harness up their teams, pack picketing gear and odd stores on the wagons and sheet them over, have themselves and everything belonging to them packed and harnessed and standing ready to turn out promptly to the shout of ‘Hook in.’ They were all ready, and with a nicely-timed handful of seconds to spare, when the word came, because the practice that makes perfect had been their regular routine for a good many months past, and there had been plenty of times when they had been obliged to do the same routine in very much less than this present leisured hour and a half. It was raining when the wagons turned out, formed up on the road, and, dropping into place unit by unit, rolled steadily off on the march. The rain was taken quite philosophically and as a matter of course, as indeed it had come to be by now and any time for a month past. There were a good many even by then who had wondered where all the rain could come from, and held a firm opinion that it must cease very soon, on the reasonable assumption that no rain supply is inexhaustible and that the past month must have ‘pretty well emptied the watering-pot.’ They were to learn for another solid three months almost without a break what the Flanders watering-pot can supply when it really sets about the job in earnest, and it was to come to be a standing joke and boast of the first Expeditionaries that you could always tell one of the men who went through that first winter in France because an examination of his toes would show him to be web-footed. But at the end of December the wet had not been accepted as such a permanent feature of life as it was to become, and there were plenty of men in the column who, as they marched out that Christmas Eve, looked up at the sky and round the grey horizon and tried to find, or persuade themselves and each other they could see, a spot where it was ‘lifting.’ But it did not lift, and before long the men’s damp clothes, half dried by body heat in sleeping in them, had become soaked and saturated through again. It was cold too, and fingers gripped about the wet reins of their pairs of horses grew numbed and stiff, were periodically revived with much blowing of warm breath—the only item of warmth left about a man—into cupped hands, and arm beating and flapping. The roads were heavy, rutted and inches deep in stiff mud, flooded in parts by the overflow from brimming-over ditches.