A woman may forget her love, a child its mother, but no Gunner ever quite forgets his first long route-march—the clink of chain and the thop of hooves on the roadway, crunch of wheels and rattle of waggons, the men’s faces on the limbers, the smoke of their cigarettes curling into the air....

It was early June when the fourth Southdown Brigade left Shoreham for its final concentration at Aldershot; and for three sun-drenched days, the mile-long column rolled on its way, inland from the sea, across the swelling weald, by white cottages where children waved and cheered, through sleepy villages and woods damp with early dews, halting to water at shallow pools on green commons, rolling on again in the warm glow of afternoon, horse-heads nodding in unison, traces taut, “numbers one” riding proudly behind their waggons.

True, they had no guns as yet: true that Lodden’s water-cart overturned on the steep upward slope out of Happy Valley: true that Stark growled at them for clumsy tailors: that fat Doctor Carson, red-cheeked and nearly white-haired, fifty if a day, grew so stiff he could hardly climb to horse:—still, they were moving, moving slowly towards the job for which each had joined, Active Service.

For these were volunteers, still eager for adventure: and though, in after days, there came the time when realization turned that eagerness to misery unutterable, to horror and the fear of maimings—nevertheless the spirit lived on, dour, untameable, ultimate arbiter of the World’s destinies....

Those three days, even unemotional Peter felt the uplift of the game. “Little Willie” danced and pranced, tossing his white silk head-rope, shaking at bit-chain; the Doctor, riding stiffly on a broad roan mare, cracked time-worn jokes, pulled steadily at his whiskey-filled water-bottle; Purves, trotting up and down the column, knees still a little uncertain against the saddle-wallets, made the passing of Stark’s simplest order into a full-dress parade.

Something in the continuous movement of it all, in their aloofness from everyday life, jolted Peter’s mind—for the first time since he had set forth, subaltern of an hour, from Lowndes Square—clean out of the commercial groove in which it had so long been running. He forgot the old things, remembered only the new. His chagrin at the loss of Nirvana found healing. Behind, rolled this new entity which he was helping to create—an entity of flesh and steel and the open air. Ahead, lay adventure....