ot know. He was a very
junior officer, not on anybody's staff and totally unconnected with
transport of any kind. He offered us the car and said that we could
start any time we liked. He himself was going on leave and the car
had to go back to G.H.Q. I had been distinctly told by the R.T.O. to
go in a train and--it was my first day in the army--I had a very high
idea of the importance of obeying orders. M. laughed at me. So did
my other friend.

"Nobody," he said, "cares a pin how you get there, and it doesn't
matter when. This week or next, it's all the same. In fact, if I were
you I should take a couple of days off and see the country before I
reported at G.H.Q."

I know now that I might have done this and that no one would have
been surprised or angry if I had. But the new-boy feeling was
still strong on me. I was afraid. It seemed to me an awful thing
to go for a tour in the war zone in a kidnapped motor, which might
for all I knew be a car specially set apart for the use of the
Commander-in-Chief.

At 6 o'clock we started in that car, M., I, and a total stranger who
emerged from the hotel at the last moment and sat on my valise. There
was also the driver and M.'s luggage. M. had a great deal of luggage.
We were horribly cramped. It rained with increasing fury. We passed
through a region of pallid mud, chalk, I suppose, which covered us
and the car with a slimy paste. But I enjoyed the drive. Sentries,
French and English, challenged us, and I could see the rain
glistening on their bayonets in the light of our lamps. We rushed
through villages and intensely gloomy woods. Sign-posts shone white
for an instant at cross roads and disappeared. The wind whipped the
rain against our faces. The white slime utterly dimmed my spectacles,
and I looked out at walls of darkness through frosted glass.

The stranger, balanced perilously on my valise, shouted to me the
news that G.H.Q. had been bombed by aeroplanes the day before. It was
all that was wanted to complete the sense of adventure. I could have
wished for a bomb or two which would miss us, for the sight of a
Taube (they were Taubes, not Fokkers or Gothas, in those days)
swooping into sight suddenly through the darkness and vanishing
again. None came.

We took the advice of our unknown travelling companion and engaged
rooms in the hotel he recommended. It was not at all a bad hotel. If
we had had any sense or experience, we should have dined and gone
straight to b