rds
the station. Deep-voiced non-coms. ran in front of the files. They were
stemming the tide of men and massing them along the barriers or in
railed squares--pretty well everywhere. The men piled their arms,
dropped their knapsacks, and not being free to go out, waited, buried
side by side in shadow.

The arrivals followed each other in volume that grew as the twilight
deepened. Along with the troops, the motors flowed up, and soon there
was an unbroken roar. Limousines glided through an enormous sea of
lorries, little, middling, and big. All these cleared aside, wedged
themselves in, subsided in their appointed places. A vast hum of voices
and mingled noises arose from the ocean of men and vehicles that beat
upon the approaches to the station and began in places to filter
through.

"That's nothing yet," said Cocon, The Man of Figures. "At Army Corps
Headquarters alone there are thirty officers' motors; and you don't
know," he added, "how many trains of fifty trucks it takes to entrain
all the Corpsmen and all the box of tricks--except, of course, the
lorries, that'll join the new sector on their feet? Don't guess,
flat-face. It takes ninety."

"Great Scott! And there are thirty-three Corps?"

"There are thirty-nine, lousy one!"

The turmoil increases; the station becomes still more populous. As far
as the eye can make out a shape or the ghost of a shape, there is a
hurly-burly of movement as lively as a panic. All the hierarchy of the
non-coms. expand themselves and go into action, pass and repass like
meteors, wave their bright-striped arms, and multiply the commands and
counter-commands that are carried by the worming orderlies and
cyclists, the former tardy, the latter maneuvering in quick dashes,
like fish in water.

Here now is evening, definitely. The blots made by the uniforms of the
poilus grouped about the hillocks of rifles become indistinct, and
blend with the ground; and then their mass is betrayed only by the glow
of pipes and cigarettes. In some places on the edge of the clusters,
the little bright points festoon the gloom like illuminated streamers
in a merry-making street.

Over this confused and heaving expanse an amalgam of voices rises like
the sea breaking on the shore: and above this unending murmur, renewed
commands, shouts, the din of a shot load or of one transferred, the
crash of steam-hammers redoubling their dull endeavors, and the roaring
of boilers.

In the immense obscurity, s