When we had left the last of them behind and had turned into Alsace again we seemed to be alone in the quiet night, when, all of a sudden, startlingly close beside us, there was the clink of a chain and the stamp of a horse’s hoof, and we could just see that we were abreast of a long line of horses and guns and men drawn up along the side of a narrow lane, barely leaving room for us to pass on to the cross-roads of the village. Here there was a long wait while the officers of the different units got their orders from the Brigadier. The men, who were drawn up along the roads leading to the village, were curiously quiet. They spoke very little and only in whispers, and even the tramp of their feet when the column began to get on the move soon after two o’clock had struck, with the Colonel marching with the infantry at its head and the dragoons darkly silhouetted against the grey walls of the houses, made hardly a sound. We gave them a long start and then followed on in the car, continually overtaking and passing different bodies of the long column, horse and foot. At one time, at a moment when we happened to be out of touch with any part of it and were rather afraid that we might have lost our way, we roused a scared German villager out of his bed and took him on board to show us the road. We were not anxious to come upon the enemy unawares, and when we sighted and caught up another body of troops, it was distinctly comforting to see in the dawning light that the colour of their trousers was red and not grey. Just after that, in the middle of a thick wood, the car stuck for a time in some boggy ground as we were trying to get past a couple of trees which the Germans had felled the day before and dragged across the road—a likely enough place for an ambush. Nothing, however, happened, and a mile or two further on, as the sun rose in front of us beyond the Rhine, a quickly-fading picture of gorgeous rose and crimson and deep blue, we overtook the head of the column, picked up the Colonel, as fresh and eager as a boy for all his sixty-two years, and five minutes later were eating bread and cheese and other good things in the orchard which was to be his headquarters in the battle of Ferette. And after all, there was no battle. The batteries took up their position in our rear, the infantry deployed in open order over the fields, the cyclists and dragoons exchanged snap-shots with the enemy’s vanishing scouts and skirmishers far away on the left flank, and gradually the town, which nestles among the wooded hills of the Bernese Jura, was surrounded. But not a German soldier was left in it, and the only result of the reconnaissance was to prove that in that part of Alsace there was no body of enemy troops strong enough to risk an attack on our half-brigade.