Although in the daytime the sun shone with undiminished fervour, the nights were getting certainly far more chilly than they had been in August.  But when one has to get up at daybreak, having never had more than four hours sleep, one does not notice it much.

During the night a fresh draft arrived.

The next morning they very soon encountered an entirely new sight, a French village hastily evacuated by the enemy.  At least half of the houses had been broken into, and all the shops and inns.  The Germans had dragged chairs and tables to the roadside, and they must have been sitting there drinking and smoking when the news of the British advance, and orders to retire had come upon them.  Everything seemed to show that the enemy had left at the shortest notice.  He had not had time to perpetrate any of his well-known barbarities on the few inhabitants who had remained in their houses, and no attempt had apparently been made even to burn the village!

A little further on, the abstemious Hun had obviously made a halt.  The litter of bottles was appalling.  There was a perfect wall of them for about a quarter of a mile.  The proportion of bottles to the number of men estimated to occupy four hundred yards (1000) was alarming.  There must have been enough drink to upset a British Army Corps.  Most certainly the Germans in front must have been out of hand, and very drunk.  The men were vastly amused.

The day dragged on very wearily, and no deployment was made.  Apparently the enemy had taken about as much as he could comfortably endure on the previous two days.  He was not waiting to be pushed back; he was speeding north-east as fast as his legs could carry him.

In the afternoon a heavy shower rather damped the excitement evoked by the enemy’s dramatic failure to hold his own.  Sounds of a fierce encounter were heard in front, and the Brigade was hurried down a steep and wooded decline to the scene of action.  They arrived too late to share in the actual infliction of defeat upon the enemy, but they were immediately sent in pursuit, as the other Brigade was very tired and rather shaken.

A man told the Subaltern that some unfortunate company, marching in fours up a village street, had been fired upon by a machine-gun controlled by a few men left behind by the enemy to inflict the greatest possible damage before discovery and capture.  They had done their work well, for, concealed in the roof of a house, they had swept the street at point-blank range and literally mown down a whole company before they had been located, and “put out of action.”  Still they must have been brave men, for the personal result of such an exploit is certain death.

The state of that street had better not be described.  The Aftermath of Battle!  It is depressing, cold and passionless, dirty and bloody; the electricity of life has gone from the air, and the wine of life-blood is spilt, it seems, so needlessly upon the ground.  Perhaps the spirits of the dead linger over it.  Their presence is instinctively felt.  As, overpowered with the sorrow of it, you pass by, the thought steals into your mind, “When will my turn come?” This Aftermath of Battle is assuredly the most awful thing in war.