Only two hours before had the engineers set out to
build the bridges which the whole division, with its regiment after
regiment, with its artillery, its guns, ammunition wagons and horses,
its transport section, and vehicles of all descriptions, was now to
cross. The landscape had changed utterly, the country was alive, and
had found voice; the horse-lines were broken, and all the animals,
from the colonel's charger to the humble pack horse, were on the move.
The little squares, dotted brown, had taken on new shape, and were
transformed into companies of moving men in khaki. We were out on the
heels of the retreating foe.
Two hours' forced marching brought us to the river, a real one, with
three pontoon bridges, newly built and held firm on flat-bottomed
boats moored in mid-stream. We took our way across, and bent to the
hill on the other side. Half-way up, in a narrow lane, a wagon got
stuck in the front of our battalion, and we were forced to come to a
halt for a moment. Looking back, I could see immediately behind three
lines of men straining to the hill; farther back the same lines were
crossing the bridges and, away in the far distance, pencilled brown on
the ploughed fields, the three lines of khaki crawled along like long
threads endlessly unwinding from some invisible ball. Now and again
I could see the artillery coming into sight, only to disappear again
over a wooded knoll or into an almost invisible hollow.
Thus the division, the apparently limitless lines of men, horses, and
guns crawled on the track of the fleeing enemy.
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