iled high with sides of Australian beef and
loaves of French-made bread. Converted motor-buses, which had once
borne the signs Bank-Holborn-Marble Arch, rumbled past with their
loads of boisterous men in khaki bound for the trenches or bringing
back other loads of tired men clad apparently in nothing save mud.
Endless strings of ambulances went rocking and rolling by and some of
them were dripping crimson. Tractors, big as elephants, panted and
grunted on their way, hauling long trains of wagons laden with tins
of cocoa or condensed milk, with kegs of nails, with lumber, with
fodder. Occasionally a gray staff-car like our own threaded its
tortuous and halting way through the terrific press of traffic. We
passed one that had broken down. The two officers who were its
occupants were seated on the muddy bank beside the road smoking
cigarettes while the driver was endeavoring to get his motor started
again. One of them, on the shoulder-straps of whose "British warm"
were the stars of a captain, was a slender, fair-haired, rather
delicate-looking youngster in the early twenties. It was the Prince of
Wales, but, so far as receiving any attention from the hurrying throng
was concerned, he might as well have been an unknown subaltern. For it
is an extremely democratic army, and royalty receives from it scant
consideration; Lloyd George is of far more importance than King George
to the man in khaki.

Almost since the beginning of the war this particular stretch of road
on which I was travelling had been shelled persistently, as was shown
by the splintered tree-stumps which lined the road and the
shell-craters which pitted the fields on either side. To keep this
road passable under such wear and tear as it had been subjected to for
many months would have been a remarkable accomplishment under any
circumstances; to keep it open under heavy shell-fire is a performance
for which the labor battalions deserve the highest praise. Wearing
their steel helmets, the road-making gangs have kept at work, night
and day, along its entire length, exposed to much of the danger of the
men in the trenches, and having none of their protection. There has
been no time to obtain ordinary road metal, so they have filled up the
holes with bricks taken from the ruined villages which dot the
landscape, rolling them level when they get the chance. For nothing
must be permitted to interfere with that flow of traffic; on it
depends the food for the men and