The country
was browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with autumnal
colour, and the wheat already golden. When they stopped for an hour
at Hirson, men and women with tricolour badges upon the platform
distributed cakes and glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there
was much cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had
had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were scouting
in the pink evening sky.
Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place called
Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to Jemelle. Here
they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the railway--trains and stores
were passing along it all night--and next morning he: marched eastward
through a cold, overcast dawn, and a morning, first cloudy and then
blazing, over a large spacious country-side interspersed by forest
towards Arlon.
There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked entrenchments
and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton that were designed to
check and delay any advance from the east upon the fortified line of
the Meuse. They had their orders, and for two days they worked without
either a sight of the enemy or any suspicion of the disaster that had
abruptly decapitated the armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris
and the centre of Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of
Pompeii.
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