on rose glorious, serene; there was no need for candles to light
us to bed. We slept heavily, too tired to worry about the morrow, or
the menacing drone of Hun 'planes overhead.

VI. BEHIND VILLEQUIER AUMONT

I have tried to explain how "this flood-burst of moving war, such as
the world had never before seen," affected one unit of the R.F.A., and
one unimportant civilian soldier who was doing adjutant; how the
immensity and swift thoroughness of the German effort must have been
realised by the casual newspaper reader in England more quickly than by
the average officer or man who had to fight against it.

5.30 A.M.: That six hours' sleep under a tarpaulin did me all the good
in the world, and by 5 A.M. I was out seeing that our Headquarter
horses were being groomed and fed and got ready for immediate action.

The guns were particularly quiet, and I remember thinking: we have
retreated eight miles in forty-eight hours--it's about time we stopped.
Something is sure to be doing farther north, where we are so much
stronger.

Breakfast and a shave; then a move forward to find the colonel, and to
learn whether he wanted the waggon lines brought up again. It was a
lovely morning. A beautiful stretch of meadowland skirted the road
leading back to Villequier Aumont, and my horse cantered as if the
buoyancy of spring possessed him also. I caught up Fentiman of D
Battery, who said he was shifting his waggon lines back to Villequier
Aumont. "The water and the standings are so much better there," he
said.

I found the colonel standing in the square at Villequier Aumont,
watching the departure by car of the three American ladies who for a
month past had dispensed tea and cakes in the gaily-painted maisonette
at the top of the village. They had been the first harbingers of the
approaching brotherhood between the British and American Armies in this
part of the Front: brave hospitable women, they had made many friends.

The colonel was not in such good mood this morning. He had remained
through the night with the infantry brigadier in the wood from which
our horse lines had withdrawn the previous evening. The dug-out was
none too large, and his only rest had been a cramped four hours trying
to sleep on the floor. With no rest at all the night before, no wonder
he looked fagged. But immediately there were orders to give, he became
his usual alert, clear-headed self. "It is most important this morning
that we should keep co