lling of
an aeroplane.

In the plains that lay beneath them, they could see the dim blue lines
of the enemy debouching.

They made Winn think of locusts. He had seen a plague once in Egypt.
They came on like the Germans, a gray mass that never broke--that could
not break, because behind it there were more, and still more locusts,
thick as clouds, impenetrable as clouds.

You killed and killed and killed, and yet there were more clouds.

Every now and then it ran through his mind like a flame, that they would
spread this loathsome, defiling cloud over the smiling little villages
of France.

Fortunately there was no time for pity; there were merely the different
ways of meeting the question of holding on.

It was like an attempt to keep back a tide with a teaspoon.

Their guns did what they could, they did more than it seemed possible
guns could do. The men in control of them worked like maniacs.

It was not a time to think of what people could do. The men were falling
like leaves off a tree.

The skylarks and the swallows vanished before the villainous occupation
of the air. The infantry in the loosely built trenches held on,
breathless, broken, like a battered boat in a hurricane, stout against
the oncoming waves.

The stars came out and night fell--night rent and tortured, darkness
assaulted and broken by a myriad new lights of death, but still
merciful, reassuring darkness. The moment for the retreat had come.

It was a never-ending business, a stumbling, bewildering business. The
guns roared on, holding open indefatigably, without cessation, the way
of their escape.

Much later they got away themselves, dashing blindly in the wake of
their exhausted little army, ready to turn at command and hold again,
and escape again, and once more hold the unending blue lines, with their
unnumbered guns, unwinding like an endless serpent in their rear.

The morning showed them still retreating. Sometimes they were miles
ahead and could see nothing but the strangely different barred and
shivering villages, small settlements of terror, in an untroubled land.

There were no flowers flung upon them now, only hurried gasping
questions, "Are they coming?" "How far are they behind you?"

Sometimes they were halted for half an hour at a time, and sat in hedges
and ate, or meant to eat, and slept between the bites.

Occasionally they surprised small bands of wandering Uhlans, and if
there was time took them prisoners, a