He looked at it this time with different eyes. His Division was one-fiftieth part of the British Army in France. It took over a day to get on the move, it occupied miles of road, absorbed train-loads of supplies, and would take two days to go thirty miles. The whole affair was so huge, that the individual man was reduced and reduced in importance until he went clean out of sight. This fellow he was pursuing, or Chirnside, or anyone who could have given any useful information about the Vanderlynden claim, might be in any one of those cigarette-smoking, slow-moving columns, on any of those springless vehicles, or beside any of those mules. He gazed at the faces of the men as they streamed past him, every county badge on their caps, every dialect known to England on their lips, probably the best natured and easiest to manage of any of the dozen or so national armies engaged in the War. He was realizing deeply the difficulty of discovering that particular “Nobby” who had broken the front of the shrine at Vanderlynden’s. It was just the thing any of them would do. How many times had he noticed their curious tenderness for uncouth animals, stray dogs or cats, even moles or hedgehogs, and above all the brazen, malevolent army mule. He was no fancier of any sort of beast, and the mule as used in France he had long realized to have two virtues and two only--cheapness and durability. You couldn’t kill them, but if you did, it was easy to get more. He had been, for a long while now, a harassed officer, busy shifting quantities of war material, human, animal, or inanimate, from one place to another, and had come to regard mules as so much movable war stores. Added to the fact that he was no fancier, this had prevented him from feeling any affection for the motive power of first-line transport. But he was conscious enough that it was not so with the men--the “other ranks” as they were denominated in all those innumerable parade states and nominal rolls with which he spent his days in dealing. No, what the fellow had done was what most drivers would do. That queer feeling about animals was the primary cause of the whole affair. Then, balancing it, was the natural carelessness about such an object as a shrine--this same brown-clothed nation that defiled before him, he knew them well. As a churchwarden, he knew that not ten per cent of them went inside a place of worship more than three or four times in the whole of their lives. Baptism for some, marriage for a good proportion, an occasional assistance at the first or last rite of some relative, finally, the cemetery chapel, that was the extent of their church-going.