It was a hard journey indeed: there was no vehicle available for him to commandeer and even had he been able to do so he would have got no further with it than he managed aboard the various lifts that he found. The roads were swollen with a massive and continual traffic of men, machines and horse-drawn transportation, all rattling over those same crippling cobbles that the Tommies cursed with such venom. In fact the going was shortly to get much rougher, but if anyone had told Kingsley this during the first mile or so of his travels he would have asked how it could get any rougher. Axles broke, horses slipped, men shouted and swore like the troopers they were. The entire army seemed to have taken to the roads but to have no particular idea why they had done so or what their hoped-for destination might be. Road marshals were everywhere attempting to impose some order on the chaos, but their efforts appeared to be entirely ineffectual. They were not, of course; slowly but surely men and equipment were moving up the line and a lesser trickle of the same was moving back from it.
