The heat, although they were in the first week in September, was greater than ever.  The blue atmosphere seemed to quiver with the shock of guns.

General Headquarters had been established in a house near by, a middle-class, flamboyant, jerry-built affair.  How its owner would have gasped if he could have seen the Field-Marshal conducting the British share of the great battle in his immodest “salle a manger!”

Aeroplanes were continually ascending from and descending to a ploughed field adjacent to the orchard.  Motors were ceaselessly dashing up and down.  Assuredly they were near to the heart of things.

That afternoon some one procured a page of the Daily Mirror, which printed the first casualty list of the war.  Perhaps you can remember reading it.  One was not used to the sensation.  One felt that “it brought things home to one.”  Not that this was by any means necessary at that time and place.  Still it was very depressing to think that in God’s beautiful sunlight, brave, strong men were being maimed and laid low for ever.  One had a vague feeling that it was blasphemous, and ought to be stopped.

It was not until dusk that a start was made, and the Regiment halted again about a mile further on and settled down for the night in a stubble field opposite a very imposing chateau.

Evidently the fight had gone well, for they passed at least two lines of hasty trenches quite deserted.

The Germans had at last been driven back!

Any joy that this discovery might have occasioned was sobered and tempered by the sight of small bodies of men bent double over their work in the purple twilight.  They were burying-parties.  Two twigs tied together and stuck in the brown mounds of earth was all the evidence there was of each little tragedy.  During the retreat the Subaltern had naturally had little opportunity to realise this most pitiable side of war, the cold Aftermath of Battle.

I will tell you of the inglorious way in which one man spent this momentous day, the wonderful hours in which the tide turned, and a Continent was saved—­in chasing chickens!  He was the Mess Sergeant, and it was his duty.  Anyway, the Mess dined gloriously off the chickens he caught, and as a couple of hayricks had been dismantled and distributed, everybody spent a tolerably comfortable night.

CHAPTER XVII

THE ADVANCE BEGINS

Although they stood to arms at the first flush of daylight on the following day, they did not march off until nearly eleven o’clock.  The men were moved into the leafy grounds of the chateau to keep them out of the sun, and beyond the observation of hostile aircraft.

The regimental butchers slew one or two sheep during the wait; but the meat subsequently proved to be abominably tough, and the fat collected to oil the bolts of the men’s rifles only served to make them stiffer than ever.