The first sight of Chame is extraordinarily exhilarating.  The old town lying so pleasantly between canal and river is the Head-quarters of an army—­not of a corps or of a division, but of a whole army—­and the network of grey provincial streets about the Romanesque towers of Notre Dame rustles with the movement of war.  The square before the principal hotel—­the incomparably named “Haute Mere-Dieu”—­is as vivid a sight as any scene of modern war can be.  Rows of grey motor-lorries and omnibuses do not lend themselves to as happy groupings as a detachment of cavalry, and spitting and spurting motor-cycles and “torpedo” racers are no substitute for the glitter of helmets and the curvetting of chargers; but once the eye has adapted itself to the ugly lines and the neutral tints of the new warfare, the scene in that crowded clattering square becomes positively brilliant.  It is a vision of one of the central functions of a great war, in all its concentrated energy, without the saddening suggestions of what, on the distant periphery, that energy is daily and hourly resulting in.  Yet even here such suggestions are never long out of sight; for one cannot pass through Chalons without meeting, on their way from the station, a long line of “eclopes”—­the unwounded but battered, shattered, frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of the awful struggle.  These poor wretches, in their thousands, are daily shipped back from the front to rest and be restored; and it is a grim sight to watch them limping by, and to meet the dazed stare of eyes that have seen what one dare not picture.

If one could think away the “’eclopes” in the streets and the wounded in their hospitals, Chalons would be an invigorating spectacle.  When we drove up to the hotel even the grey motors and the sober uniforms seemed to sparkle under the cold sky.  The continual coming and going of alert and busy messengers, the riding up of officers (for some still ride!), the arrival of much-decorated military personages in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances and the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sights that the pacific stranger could forever gape at.  And in the hotel, what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats and haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about the packed tables in the restaurant!  It is not easy for civilians to get to Chalons, and almost every table is occupied by officers and soldiers—­for, once off duty, there seems to be no rank distinction in this happy democratic army, and the simple private, if he chooses to treat himself to the excellent fare of the Haute Mere-Dieu, has as good a right to it as his colonel.