[Sidenote:  PERONNE]

Some of the streets are almost amusing.  Imagine Rye with the pretty alleys so encumbered and piled up with roofs, sofas, the contents of wardrobes, dormer-windows, smashed mirrors, rubble, and dust, that it’s quite impossible to proceed.  Very well, that’s ——.

Go into the houses, and there it’s just as it is in the streets.  Everything crushed to atoms.  Images of saints have been hurled out on to garbage-heaps, and in the cathedral huge pillars are lying about in clumsy confusion amongst chairs, organ pipes, and gilded flowers.

On a huge notice board in the Grande Place the Hun has written: 

     NICHT ARGERN:  NUR WUNDERN!

(Don’t argue:  only wonder!  We the Huns did this.  Why discuss what we have done?  We have destroyed your city.  Gape and stare, stupid fools!  What does it matter to us?  We took your precious town from you, because we wanted it.  Now we don’t want it any more.  Here it is back again.  With our love.) Some merry soldier wrote that up, I suppose.  It was a pity.

There were French officers in ——­ to-day.  I spoke to one.  He answered with a quiet, simple bitterness and determination that would have turned even a Hohenzollern pale, I think.  Unhappy Emperor! he must be feeling decidedly uneasy nowadays.

Another odd sight was a tub full of water, with a little dog trying to get out.  But the little dog was dead.  A crump evidently landed somewhere near, and just petrified him, as it were.  You often see men like that, struck dead in the middle of some act.  Men are usually turned a dull purplish or greenish black.  So was this little dog.  We ate a delicious lunch on the battlements, our legs dangling 50 feet above the reedy water.  Lots of moorhen and coot swimming about.

The sun was warm.  We enjoyed ourselves immensely.  What a heavenly world it is!

April 6.

After a hectic day comes this chance of writing to you.  Eleven-thirty p.m.

Would you like to hear about night flying?  I didn’t go, but I sketched the others going.  And these are some notes.  A bombing raid.  It had been ordered in the morning.  A raid on ——.  After a cheery dinner we trooped out, singing foolish songs.  The hangars a few hundred yards away across the mud.  They looked huge and eerie, looming up from the dark ground, all stately in the moonlight.  The moon had a halo, but was very bright, bright enough to sketch by.

[Sidenote:  NIGHT FLYING]

Six flares were flickering at intervals round the aerodrome.  A vivid orange colour against the dim blue sky.  The horizon was greyer, and little flames flashed intermittently from it.  There were the aeroplanes waiting.

It was very cold.  Soon the mechanics were starting the machines.  The usual loud spurting and fizzing till presently the first machine begins to move.  A big semi-luminous beetle lurching forward; then faster and faster and away, lifting up, up, up into the night.  Only the lights visible now, but you can hear the hum of the engines a long way off.  Other machines follow.  The sky is full of twinkling fairies.  They circle about for a bit, and then all head towards the east.  Gradually the humming dies away in the distance.  Look out for yourselves, you sleeping Huns!