Every village that we pass through is full of soldiers bestirring for the day, while already the main arteries of travel to the trenches are filling up with the activities of the morning. It is a perfectly still day, and with each advancing hour it is growing hotter. There has been no rain for a week or two, the dust is deep upon the roads, and as our cars hum along the highways we leave volumes of the thin cloud in our wake. Now and again we pass small columns of infantry marching cheerfully along in the sunshine, each man in a cloud of dust. Yet every face is cheerful, and almost without exception the men are singing their marching songs as they swing along the highways. In the villages and on the road everything suggests war, but now with quite a different atmosphere from that of last autumn. Then it was war also, but of war the novelty, the new and the untried. Then all faces were anxious, some apprehensive, some depressed. They were going into a new experience. Now, however, it is war as a tried and experienced profession that is about us. The conduct of the campaign has become as much of a business to the soldiers and to the officers as the operating of a railroad to men engaged in running it. The deaths and the wounds have become to these men we see now simply a part of their profession, and they have seen so much of this side of the business that it has long since been discounted. The whole atmosphere of the front as we see it in May is as that of a permanent state of society. These men look as though they had been fighting for ten years and expected to be fighting for the rest of their days. War has become the commonplace and peace seems the unreality. At brigade head-quarters we halt a few minutes and are directed to proceed slowly along a certain road, and advised to stop in a cut just before passing over a certain crest. When we learn that the enemy’s guns command the road over the crest we inquire with the keenest interest the exact location of the ridge mentioned, for something suggests to us that this is a bit of interesting information that the artillery officer is handing out to us so very casually. They are all casual by the way; probably they have all got so used to sudden death and destruction that they feel as nonchalant about their own fate as they do about others. Half an hour’s run over very heavy and sandy road, brought us on to a great white ribbon of a highway that ran due west and dipped over the ridge.