At length the Division moved right up into the coal-fields and sat down by a slag heap near Béthune. Then Colonel Birchin called to him one morning across the office: “I say, Dormer, I’ve got the whereabouts of that fellow Chirnside. He’s near Rheims. You’ll have to go.” Dormer went. For two whole days he travelled across civilian France. France of the small farm, the small town, and the small villa. Far beyond the zone of the English Army, far beyond the zone of any army, he passed by Creil to Paris, and from Paris on again into a country of vine-clad hills above a river. He was in a part where he had never been as a soldier, never gone for one of those brief holidays to Switzerland he had sometimes taken. It caused him much amusement to think of the regular Calais--Bâle express of pre-War days. If they would only run that train now, how it would have to zig-zag over trenches, and lines of communication. He entered the zone of a French Army. On all sides, in the towns and villages, in the camps and manœuvre areas, he saw blue-coated men, and stared at them, with the same fascinated interest as he now felt, in spite of himself, in spite of any habit or tradition or inclination, in his own khaki variety. These fellows carried more on their backs, had far less transport. His general impression was of something grimmer, more like purgatory, than that which English troops gave him. The physical effort of the individual was greater, his food, pay and accommodation less. And there was none of that extraordinary volunteering spirit of the Kitchener Armies, the spirit which said: “Lumme, boys, here’s a war. Let’s have a go at it!” The French had most of them been conscripted, had known that such a thing might, probably would happen to them, had been prepared for it for years. They had not the advantage of being able to say to themselves: “Well, I jolly well asked for it. Now I’ve got it!” A saturnine fate brooded over them. He noticed it in the railway and other officials he met. They were so much more official. R.T.O.’s and A.P.M.’s--or the equivalent of them, he supposed--who surveyed his credentials, and passed him on to the place where he was going, did so with the cynical ghost of amusement, as who should say: “Aha! This is you. You’re going there, are you? You might as well go anywhere else.”