ith,
and had to fight against odds, which doesn't matter really if you have
the right men, but always takes longer and looks discouraging to
outsiders. The men are very good and I am glad the War Office let me
commandeer the boots I wanted--the kind they offered me at first
wouldn't have done at all for this sort of work. It is rather hard not
being with the men more, but the work is very absorbing, so I do not
mind as much as I did.

"I think the regiment will come out later, and they have promised to let
me go back into it. I am sorry about the villages. It's a pity the
Germans slopped over into France at all. I found two Uhlans yesterday in
a farmyard; they had been behaving badly, so I did them both in.

"One very seldom sees any of them, worse luck.

"I hope you are taking great care of yourself and not worrying. Your
loving Winn."

In the weeks that followed, Claire got many letters. They were short
letters, written in flying motors, in trains, in outhouses, in romantic
chateaux; but they all began in the same reassuring way. "I am very
well, and we are getting on quite nicely."

The Allied line was being flung out in wild curves and swoops like the
flight of a dove before a hawk; from Soissons up toward Calais they
fenced and circled.

They retook Rheims, they seized Amiens. Lille fell from them and Laon.

The battle of the Aisne passed by slow degrees out of their hands, and
the English found themselves fighting their extraordinary first fight
for Ypres. They stood between the Germans and the Channel ports as
thinly as a Japanese screen, between England and the Atlantic. The very
camp cooks were in the trenches.

Time fled like a long thunderous hour. It was a storm that flashed and
fell and returned again.

Winn was beginning to feel tired now. He hardly slept at night, and by
day his brain moved as if it were made of red-hot steel, flying rapidly
from expedient to expedient, facing the hourly problems of that wild and
wet October, how to keep men alive who never rested, who were too few,
who took the place of guns. He wrote more seldom now, and once he said,
"We are having rather a hard time, but we shall get through with it."

Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct,
and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the
more readily to adapt the changes of the hour.

They remade their external world, out of this new warfare.

They remade it at the