raid.'

'No,' he said. 'I don't think I am--much. Well. I'm content!'

I started Blenkiron off in a car for Corps Headquarters, and in the
afternoon took the road myself. I knew every inch of the country--the
lift of the hill east of Amiens, the Roman highway that ran straight as
an arrow to St Quentin, the marshy lagoons of the Somme, and that broad
strip of land wasted by battle between Dompierre and Peronne. I had
come to Amiens through it in January, for I had been up to the line
before I left for Paris, and then it had been a peaceful place, with
peasants tilling their fields, and new buildings going up on the old
battle-field, and carpenters busy at cottage roofs, and scarcely a
transport waggon on the road to remind one of war. Now the main route
was choked like the Albert road when the Somme battle first
began--troops going up and troops coming down, the latter in the last
stage of weariness; a ceaseless traffic of ambulances one way and
ammunition waggons the other; busy staff cars trying to worm a way
through the mass; strings of gun horses, oddments of cavalry, and here
and there blue French uniforms. All that I had seen before; but one
thing was new to me. Little country carts with sad-faced women and
mystified children in them and piles of household plenishing were
creeping westward, or stood waiting at village doors. Beside these
tramped old men and boys, mostly in their Sunday best as if they were
going to church. I had never seen the sight before, for I had never
seen the British Army falling back. The dam which held up the waters
had broken and the dwellers in the valley were trying to save their
pitiful little treasures. And over everything, horse and man, cart and
wheelbarrow, road and tillage, lay the white March dust, the sky was
blue as June, small birds were busy in the copses, and in the corners
of abandoned gardens I had a glimpse of the first violets.

Presently as we topped a rise we came within full noise of the guns.
That, too, was new to me, for it was no ordinary bombardment. There was
a special quality in the sound, something ragged, straggling,
intermittent, which I had never heard before. It was the sign of open
warfare and a moving battle.

At Peronne, from which the newly returned inhabitants had a second time
fled, the battle seemed to be at the doors. There I had news of my
division. It was farther south towards St Christ. We groped our way
among bad roads to where its headquart