ty fast to cover up what man at war does.
True, the yellow-green meadowlands ahead of us were scuffed and scored
minutely as though a myriad swine had rooted there for mast. The gouges
of wheels and feet were at the roadside. Under the broken hedge-rows you
saw a littering of weather-beaten French knapsacks and mired uniform
coats, but that was all. New grass was springing up in the hoof tracks,
and in a pecking, puny sort of way an effort was being made by certain
French peasants within sight to get back to work in their wasted truck
patches. Near at hand I counted three men and an old woman in the
fields, bent over like worms. On the crest above them stood this gray
veteran of two invasions of their land, aiming with his riding whip. The
whip, I believe, signifies dominion, and sometimes brute force.

Beyond the tableland, and along the succession of gentle elevations
which ringed it in to the south, the pounding of the field pieces went
steadily on, while Von Zwehl lectured to us upon the congenial subject
of what he here had done. Out yonder a matter of three or four English
miles from us the big ones were busy for a fact. We could see the smoke
clouds of each descending shell and the dust clouds of the explosion,
and of course we could hear it. It never stopped for an instant, never
abated for so much as a minute. It had been going on this way for
weeks; it would surely go on this way for weeks yet to come. But so far
as we could discern the General paid it no heed--he nor any of his
staff. It was his business, but seemingly the business went well.

It was late that afternoon when we met our third general, and this
meeting was quite by chance. Coming back from a spin down the lines we
stopped in a small village called Amifontaine, to let our chauffeur,
known affectionately as The Human Rabbit, tinker with a leaky tire valve
or something. A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who
we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of
the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced
in due form to General d'Elsa, the head of the Twelfth Reserve Corps, it
turned out. Standing in a ceremonious ring, with filled glasses in our
hands, about a table which bore a flary lamp and a bottle of bad native
wine, we toasted him and he toasted us.

He was younger by ten years, I should say, than either Von Heeringen or
Von Zwehl; too young, I judged, to have got hi