invent myself. I had a plain task, and to fulfil it I had to use
what methods the Almighty allowed me. I hardly slept, I ate little, I
was on the move day and night, but I never felt so strong in my life.
It seemed as if I couldn't tire, and, oddly enough, I was happy. If a
man's whole being is focused on one aim, he has no time to worry ... I
remember we were all very gentle and soft-spoken those days. Lefroy,
whose tongue was famous for its edge, now cooed like a dove. The troops
were on their uppers, but as steady as rocks. We were against the end
of the world, and that stiffens a man ...

Day after day saw the same performance. I held my wavering front with
an outpost line which delayed each new attack till I could take its
bearings. I had special companies for counter-attack at selected
points, when I wanted time to retire the rest of the division. I think
we must have fought more than a dozen of such little battles. We lost
men all the time, but the enemy made no big scoop, though he was always
on the edge of one. Looking back, it seems like a succession of
miracles. Often I was in one end of a village when the Boche was in the
other. Our batteries were always on the move, and the work of the
gunners was past praising. Sometimes we faced east, sometimes north,
and once at a most critical moment due south, for our front waved and
blew like a flag at a masthead ... Thank God, the enemy was getting
away from his big engine, and his ordinary troops were fagged and poor
in quality. It was when his fresh shock battalions came on that I held
my breath ... He had a heathenish amount of machine-guns and he used
them beautifully. Oh, I take my hat off to the Boche performance. He
was doing what we had tried to do at the Somme and the Aisne and Arras
and Ypres, and he was more or less succeeding. And the reason was that
he was going bald-headed for victory.

The men, as I have said, were wonderfully steady and patient under the
fiercest trial that soldiers can endure. I had all kinds in the
division--old army, new army, Territorials--and you couldn't pick and
choose between them. They fought like Trojans, and, dirty, weary, and
hungry, found still some salt of humour in their sufferings. It was a
proof of the rock-bottom sanity of human nature. But we had one man
with us who was hardly sane....

In the hustle of those days I now and then caught sight of Ivery. I had
to be everywhere at all hours, and often visited that rem