The streets are full of people. They are lining the pavement on both sides and watching us march past. Though it is still quite an early hour of the morning, yet the whole town is up and about. They weren't able to stay abed. They wanted to see the soldiers march out. And they welcome us with their eyes and wave their hands to us. A fifteen-year-old lad is running along beside us. His brother is marching in our file. "Mother sends you her love; she says she is feeling better again--but she wasn't well enough to get up yet, else she'd have come with me this morning--but I was to give you this from her." And the lad stretches his open hand out to his brother, and tries to hand him something wrapped up in paper--money! But the elder brother waves it aside. "Put it away. Tell her I said she was to spend it on herself, and to look after herself properly, and be well and fit when we come back again." Reluctantly the lad puts the money in his pocket. A little ahead of us a young woman is tripping alongside. We have set a pretty smart pace, and she has to break into a run to keep up. But though her feet may stumble over the uneven pavement she never turns her eyes from her husband. What they may have to say to each other at the very last moment we can't catch. But we catch the expression of her face, and her comically touching devotion. And now the crowds accompanying their soldiers through the streets become denser and denser. A few folk who are seeing members of their family off are running beside every section. White-haired fathers and mothers, with anxious looks, sisters, sweethearts, wives. There is one among them of whom you can tell at a glance that she is about to become a mother. Well, she will be brought to bed lonely and desolate. The man marching on my right, a taciturn yokel, who until now has been staring gloomily straight ahead of him, half turns to me. "How many kids are there under way that'll never come to see their dads?" And then he thaws, and begins to talk about his brother, who had to leave with the Army Service Corps two days before, and he was called on the Colors the very same day his wife was brought to bed, so that he had to leave her before she was out of the wood. "Almost make you think us wasn't human beings." The drums and fifes strike up briskly, and play a merry march. Some one or other, somewhere in the crowd, sets up a loud, crowing sort of cheer. "Hip! hip! hooray!" And the others join in. It spreads all down the whole length of the street, and does not die down again. But it leaves my yokel unmoved. "What's the good of that how-d'ye-do? Folks are fair crazed. There is no sense in it." I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He is impenetrably rapt in his own gloomy reflections. Then he begins again. "Ah've left a wife and three kids to home. They're to get a few pence a day, the lot, and nought more. And that's what four people have got to live on." Some one tries to cheer him up.