When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet
gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all
about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly
blue.
It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that
vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel
ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see up
to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups of
trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay
concealed a _corps d'armee_--and not to see or hear a soul. The
only human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very
slowly up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot
dead across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As
we went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men
indeed, and many houses, all in movement with the early morning; and the
chalked numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of
polishing-paste or an order scrawled on paper and tacked to a wall
betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army there was nothing at
all. Scouting on foot (for that was what it was) is a desperate
business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell you whether
you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles.
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