The Glory of the Coming by Irvin S. Cobb

OUT of the luncheon sprang an invitation, and out of the invitation was born a trip. On a day when the atmosphere was better fitted for automobiling in closed cars than for bombings we headed away from our billets, travelling in what I shall call a general direction, there being four of us besides the sergeant who drove. Things were stirring along the Front. Miles away we could hear the battery heavies thundering and drumming, and once in a lull we detected the hammering staccato of a machine gun tacking down the loose edges of a fight that will never be recorded in history, with the earnestness and briskness of a man laying a carpet in a hurry.

The Romans taught the French how to plan highroads, and the French never forgot the lesson. The particular road we travelled ran kilometre on kilometre straight as a lance up the hills and down again across the valleys, and only turned out to round the shoulders of a little mountain or when it flanked the shore line of one of the small brawling French rivers. The tall poplars in pairs, always in pairs, which edged it were like lean old gossips bending in toward the centre the better to exchange whispered scandal about the neighbours. Mainly the road pierced through fields, with infrequent villages to be passed and once a canal to be skirted; but also there were forests where wild boar were reputed to reside and where, as we know, the pheasant throve in numbers undreamed of in the ante-bellum days before all the powder in Europe was needed to kill off men, and while yet some of it might be spared for killing off birds.