what was happening. I knew only that, as I was
more than half way across the Mulvian Bridge, a wave of cheers started far
forward in our column and ran back to my century and all the way to the
rearmost men. What had occurred we did not know, but we broke ranks and
flowed out of the road to left and right, as did the men ahead of us,
becoming almost a mob, despite the remonstrances and orders of our
disgusted sergeants. They restrained us to some extent, but we were kept
back more by the fact that the foremost men blocked the highway, the men
who had been marching next them blocked the fields to right and left of
the highway and the rest of us were checked behind them, like water above
a dam.

As we stood there, packed together, with hardly a semblance of ranks kept
anywhere, craning to see over the heads of the men in front of us and to
try to see past and between the many big and tall tombs and mausoleums
which flanked the road on either side, a period of tense silence or
blurred murmurings was ended by a second great surge of cheers from front
to rear. We all cheered till we were hoarse. Again we peered and listened
and questioned each other, again came a roar of cheering like a sea
billow. Again and again alternated the half silence and the uproar. Before
we learned what was happening or had happened word came from mouth to
mouth that we were going on. The press in front of us gradually melted
away, we were able to sidle into the roadway, reform ranks and tramp on
Romewards.

After a very brief march we turned aside to our right into a meadow on the
west of the road and its flanking rows of tombs, between the Highway and
the Tiber, about half way from Mulvian Bridge to the Flaminian Gate of
Rome; that is, about half a mile from each. There we found a meticulously
laid-out and perfectly appointed camp, precisely suited to the forty-five
hundred of us and our requisitioned mules, wagons and what not. It
contained some four hundred and fifty tents, set on clipped grass along
rolled and gravelled streets as straight as bricklayers' guide-boards; all
about a paved square of ample size, on the rear of which was set up a
gorgeous commander's tent of the whitest canvas, striped with red almost
as deep, rich and glowing as the Imperial crimson, and manifestly meant to
imitate it as closely as such a dyestuff could. On either side of this
Praetorium were a dozen tents, smaller indeed than the Praetorium, but
much larger than