Seated in the motor-trucks cobblers mended boots and broken harness; farriers on tiny anvils beat out horseshoes.

No officer followed a wrong turning, no officer asked his way.

He followed the map strapped to his side and on which for his guidance in red ink his route was marked.

At night he read this map by the light of an electric torch buckled to his chest.
To perfect this monstrous engine, with its pontoon bridges, its wireless, its hospitals, its aeroplanes that in rigid alignment sailed before it, its field telephones that, as it advanced, strung wires over which for miles the vanguard talked to the rear, all modern inventions had been prostituted.

To feed it millions of men had been called from homes, offices, and workshops; to guide it, for years the minds of the high-born, with whom it is a religion and a disease, had been solely concerned.
It is, perhaps, the most efficient organization of modern times; and its purpose only is death.