A young officer on foot could scarcely walk. He moved in a kind of
trance, and each step was difficult. He may have been half asleep.
At intervals a triangular sign was borne aloft--red, blue, or some
other tint. These signs indicated the positions of the different
companies in the trenches. (Needless to say that the regiment had
come during the night from a long spell of the trenches--but what
trenches?) Then came the gorgeous regimental colours, and every
soldier in the street saluted them, and every civilian raised his hat.

I noticed more and more that the men were exhausted, were at the
limit of their endurance. Then passed a group which was quite fresh.
A Red Cross detachment! No doubt they had had very little to do.
After them a few horses, grey and white; and then field-kitchens
and equipment-carts. And then a machine-gun on a horse's back;
others in carts; pack-mules with ammunition-boxes; several more
machine-gun sections. And then more field-kitchens. In one of these
the next meal was actually preparing, and steam rose from under a
great iron lid. On every cart was a spare wheel for emergencies;
the hub of every wheel was plaited round with straw; the harness
was partly of leather and partly of rope ending in iron hooks. Later
came a long Red Cross van, and after it another field-kitchen
encumbered with bags and raw meat and strange oddments, and
through the interstices of the pile, creeping among bags and raw
meat, steam gently mounted, for a meal was maturing in that
perambulating kitchen also. Lastly, came a cart full of stretchers and
field-hospital apparatus. The regiment, its music still faintly audible,
had gone by--self-contained, self-supporting. There was no
showiness of a review, but the normal functioning, the actual
dailiness, of a line regiment as it lives strenuously in the midst of