I found myself in the midst of a new and extraordinary activity of the French and English Armies. Regiments were being rushed up to the centre of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon. That was before last Tuesday, when the English troops [Transcriber: original 'toops'] were fighting hard at Creil. This great movement continued for several days, putting to a severe test the French railway system, which is so wonderfully organized that it achieved this mighty transportation of troops with clockwork regularity. Working to a time table dictated by some great brain which in Headquarters Staff of the French Army, calculated with perfect precision the conditions of a network of lines on which troop trains might be run to a given point. It was an immense victory of organization, and a movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the German deathblow would again be averted. I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance. "It is nothing, my little one," said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with the laughing eyes of a D'Artagnan; "we shall bite their heads off. These brutal bosches are going to put themselves in a guetapens, a veritable deathtrap. We shall have them at last." Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards, their blue coats with turned-back flaps were war worn and flanked with the dust of long marches; their red trousers were sloppy and stained, but they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was a joy to see. They are very proud, these French soldiers, of fighting side by side with their old foes. The English now, after long centuries of strife, from Edward, the Black Prince, to Wellington, are their brothers-in-arms upon the battlefields, and because I am English they offered me their cigarettes and made me one of them. But I realized even then that the individual is of no account in this inhuman business of war. It is only masses of men that matter, moved by common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move rapidly in vast numbers and in the right direction to support the French lines which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town, and whom I had followed in their retirement, back and back, with the English always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the outskirts of Paris itself.