ndreds
of houses by bombs and gun-fire. My little room was on the floor below
the garret, and here at night, after a long day in the fields up by
Pozieres or Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to
Bapaume, in the long struggle and slaughter over every inch of ground, I
used to write my day's despatch, to be taken next day (it was before we
were allowed to use the military wires) by King's Messenger to England.

Those articles, written at high speed, with an impressionism born out
of many new memories of tragic and heroic scenes, were interrupted
sometimes by air-bombardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens
during the Somme fighting, to unload their bombs as near to the station
as they could guess, which was not often very near. Generally they
killed a few women and children and knocked a few poor houses and a shop
or two into a wild rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote,
listening to the crashing of glass and the anti-aircraft fire of French
guns from the citadel, I used to wonder subconsciously whether I should
suddenly be hurled into chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence,
and now and again in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get my
message done (the censors were waiting for it downstairs) I had to get
up and walk into the passage to listen to the infernal noise in the
dark city of Amiens. But I went back again and bent over my paper,
concentrating on the picture of war which I was trying to set down so
that the world might see and understand, until once again, ten minutes
later or so, my will-power would weaken and the little devil of fear
would creep up to my heart and I would go uneasily to the door again to
listen. Then once more to my writing... Nothing touched the house in the
rue Amiral Courbet while we were there. But it was into my bedroom that
a shell went crashing after that night in March when Amiens was badly
wrecked, and we listened to the noise of destruction all around us from
a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other side of the way. I should have
been sleeping still if I had slept that night in my little old bedroom
when the shell paid a visit.

There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and when I think of
darkness I think of that city in time of war, when all the streets
were black tunnels and one fumbled one's way timidly, if one had no
flash-lamp, between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming
into sharp collision sometimes with other