three of whom couldn't even speak French, visiting for days and sometimes weeks at a time, not only among French troops, but American and British too; which was the moment when the inspectors and inquisitors in their belts and tabs and pips and bars and eagles and wreaths and stars, realised the-not enormity, but monstrosity, incredibility; the monstrous incredibility, the incredible monstrosity, with which they were confronted: the moment when they learned that during three of these two-week leave-periods, two last year and the third last month, less than three weeks ago, the entire squad had vanished from France itself, vanished one night with their passes and transport and ration warrants from their rest-billets, and reappeared one morning two weeks later in ranks again, with the passes and warrants still unstamped and intact-mon-strous and incredible, since there was but one place on earth in almost four years now where thirteen men in uniform could have gone without having their papers stamped, needing no papers at all in fact, only darkness and a pair of wire-cutters; they-the Wednesday inquisitors and examiners, the inspectors-general and the provost-marshals flanked now by platoons of N. C. O. 's and M. P,'s with pistols riding light to the hand in the unstrapped holsters-were moving rapidly indeed now, with a sort of furious calm, along, among that unbroken line of soiled, stained, unchevroned and braidless men designated only by serial numbers stretching from Alsace to the Channel, who for almost four years now had been standing in sleepless rotation behind their cocked and loaded rifles in the apertures of that one continuous fircstep, but who now were not watching the opposite German line at all but, as though they had turned their backs on war, were watching them, the inquisitors, the inspectors, the alarmed and outraged and amazed; until a heliograph in a French observation post began to blink, and one behind the German line facing it answered; and at noon that Mon-day, the whole French front and the German one opposite it fell silent, and at three o'clock the American and the British fronts and the German one facing them followed suit, so that when night fell, both the dense subterrene warrens lay as dead as Pompeii or Carthage beneath the constant watchful arch and plop of rockets and the slow wink and thud of back-area guns.
So now they had a protagonist for anguishment, an object for execration, stumbling and panting on that Wednesday morning through the kilometres' final converging, above which the city soared into the sunlight the spires and crenellations of its golden diadem, pouring, crowding through the old city gates, becoming one with that vast warrened shadow out of which, until yesterday, the city's iron and martial splendor had serenely stood, but which now had become one seethe and turmoil which had overflowed the boulevard at dawn and was still pouring across the city after the fleeing lorries.
As the lorries sped across the city, they soon outdistanced the crowd, though when its vanguard emerged also onto the sunny plain beyond, the lorries were in sight again, fleeing in a sucking swirl of primrose-colored dust toward the camouflage-painted huddle of the prison-compound a kilometre and a half away.
But for a moment, the crowd seemed unable to discern or distinguish the lorries. It stopped, bunching onto itself like a blind worm thrust suddenly into sunlight, recoiling into arres'I'mcnt, so that motion itself seemed to repudiate it in one fleeing ripple like a line of invisible wind running down a windrow of wheat. Then they distinguished or located the speeding dust, and broke, surged, not running now, because-old men and women and children-they had run themselves out crossing the city, and no longer shouting now either because they had spent themselves voiceless too, but hurrying, panting, stumbling, beginning-now that they were clear of the city-to spread out fanwise across the plain, so that already they no longer resembled a worm, but rather again that wave of water which had swept