Wrong again.  Shall I tell you?

VICTORIA.

I’ll send you a telegram directly I get across the briny.

And I plead for no “back from the war tea-parties,” please!

* * * * *

[Illustration:  PERONNE From BIACHES A few days after the evacuation.  From a distance the place looked almost intact, as some of the outside walls had been left standing.  That white building in the centre of the town was once the cathedral.  MONT ST. QUENTIN on the left.  The thin white lines on the slopes beyond are trenches.]

March 22.

[Sidenote:  THE HUN RETREAT]

The Hun rearguards are now well beyond ——.  I knew the place so intimately from photographs, and from high up in the air, that a view of it from terra-firma promised to be quite interesting.

So with great eagerness, some sandwiches, and the faithful sketchbook, I sallied forth.  Harry came, too.  A glorious day of brilliant sun and brief snowstorms.

From the aerodrome through all this devastated country, past wrecked villages, orchards laid waste, dug-out camps, bivouac camps, R.E. dumps, light railways, battered trollies lying on their sides, and all the ugly confusion of old wire rusted a red-hot colour, bits of corrugated iron, bits of netting screens, more wire, dead horses, dead men in all stages of decomposition, legs, hands, heads scattered anywhere, dead trees, mud, broken rifles, gas-bags, tin helmets, bully-beef tins, derelict trenches, derelict telephone wires, grenades, aerial torpedoes, all the toys of war, broken and useless.  Tommy, the dear hairies, and the R.E. dumps, to remind you what vast stores of everything are still being accumulated.

The ground becomes more and more like boiling porridge as you approach no-man’s-land.  Of no-man’s-land itself, perhaps, the less said the better.  No-beast’s-land—­call it that rather.  And yet men have been very brave, very tender, in no-man’s-land.  Next we come to those Hun trenches that I have peered at from a distance so long and mapped so often.  It all seems rather futile now.

Past the support trenches.  Past the second line.  Damn it! how much larger and deeper that old emplacement is than I thought!  The country is less pitted, too.  Of course, it hasn’t been fought over like our back areas.  Why; here are trees scarcely knocked about at all.  A recognizable field there.  How real that stream looks!  And, oh Jemima! a blue tit.

A little distance farther.  Over that gentle rise, and there behold ——.  Surely one of the loveliest towns in France, on its low hill surrounded by the quiet waters of the Somme.  From a distance it looks all right; though somehow, the smoke still ascending from it doesn’t look natural.

As you approach you realize that what looks so charming is just empty, shelled, charred, and broken.  The Huns have destroyed every single house, all the bridges, and the cathedral, too.  The cathedral that once crowned the town now stands a pale crushed ghost in the deserted market-place.