nd if there was no time, shot them
in rows against white walls.

Once they met a troop out of one of their own divisions, led by a
solitary subaltern of nineteen, with queer fixed eyes, who didn't know
who he was. All he could say, "I brought them out."

Despatch riders hurled themselves upon the Staff with orders; very often
they had conflicting orders; and they always had dust, trouble with
horses, trouble with motor ambulances, trouble with transport. Enraged
heroic surgeons achieving hourly physical miracles, implored with tears
to be given impossible things like time. Of course they couldn't have
time.

Then in the midst of chaos, orders would come to hold. The guns
unlimbered, the transports tore madly ahead. Everything that could be
cleared off down the road was cleared off, more rough trenches were dug,
more hot and sullen hours of waiting followed, and then once more the
noise, the helpless slaughter, the steady dogged line gripping the
shallow earth, and the unnumbered horde of locusts came on again, eating
up the fields of France.

Sometimes whole regiments entrained under the care of fatherly French
railway officials, curiously liable to hysteria on ordinary excursion
days, but now as calm as Egyptian Pyramids in the face of national
disaster. They pieced together with marvelous ingenuity the broken
thread of speech presented to them by the occasional French scholars
upon the British Staff; but more often still they shook polite and
emphatic heads, and explained that there quite simply were no trains.
The possible, yes; but the impossible, no. One could not create trains.
So the men went on marching. They did not like retreating, but they
moved as if they were on parade in front of Buckingham Palace, and when
they held, they fought as winners fight.

It was not until they reached the Marne that Winn found time to write to
Claire. "We are getting on very nicely," he wrote. "I hope you are not
worrying about us. We have plenty to eat, though we have to take our
meals a little hurriedly.

"There is a good deal of work to do.

"This war is the best thing that ever happened to me--bar one. Before I
came out I thought I should go to pieces. I feel quite free to write to
you now. I do not think there can be any harm in it, so I hope you won't
mind. If things do not seem to be going very well with us at first,
remember that they never do.

"Every campaign I ever went in for, we were short-handed to start w