ng timber
between each crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the
anti--aircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of those
officers who had come down from the fighting--lines nerve-racked and
fever-stricken. They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about from
bed to bed, with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed no
other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at that time, though
they had done the hero's job all right.

It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that an
officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, "If there is another air raid
I shall go mad." He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les
Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over
sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until
he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients
had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.

XVI

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all
its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered
forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest
tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old
battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st,
when our lines were stormed and broken by his men's odds against our
defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like
all who knew what had happened better than the troops themselves.
Every day after the first break-through we pushed out in different
directions--Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes until we came up
with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back and back, day after
day, with increasing speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It was
a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It was a chaos like that of
upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying to rescue its eggs and
sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed by some controlling
or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and sticks these
soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our front-lines, were
trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks, ambulances, hospital
stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers, agricultural implements,
transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A. tents, gun-horse and mule
columns, while rear-guard actions were being fought within gunfire of
them and walking wounded were hobbling bac