I don’t know what it was.  It may have been the bright and clear evening glow, but—­you will laugh—­the refugees seemed to me absurdly beautiful.  A dolorous, patriarchal procession of old men with white beards leading their asthmatic horses that drew huge country carts piled with clothes, furniture, food, and pets.  Frightened cows with heavy swinging udders were being piloted by lithe middle-aged women.  There was one girl demurely leading goats.  In the full crudity of curve and distinctness of line she might have sat for Steinlen,—­there was a brownness, too, in the atmosphere.  Her face was olive and of perfect proportions; her eyelashes long and black.  She gave me a terrified side-glance, and I thought I was looking at the picture of the village flirt in serene flight.

I connect that girl with a whisky-and-soda, drunk about midnight out of a tin mug under the trees, thanks to the kindness of the Divisional Train officers.  It did taste fine.

The next day (September 4th) I was attached to the Divisional Cyclists.  We spent several hours on the top of a hill, looking right across the valley for Germans.  I was glad of the rest, as very early in the morning I had been sent off at full speed to prevent an officer blowing up a bridge.  Luckily I blundered into one of his men, and scooting across a mile of heavy plough, I arrived breathless at the bridge, but just in time.  The bridge in the moonlight looked like a patient horse waiting to be whipped on the raw.  The subaltern was very angry.  There had been an alarm of Uhlans, and his French escort had retired from the bridge to safer quarters....

I shared Captain Burnett’s lunch, and later went to fetch some men from a bridge that we had blown up.  It seemed to me at the time that the bridge had been blown up very badly.  As a matter of fact, German infantry crossed it four hours after I had left it.

We had “the wind up” that afternoon.  It appears that a patrol of six Uhlans had either been cut off or had somehow got across the river at Meaux.  Anyway, they rode past an unsuspecting sleepy outpost of ours, and spread alarm through the division.  Either the division was panicky or the report had become exaggerated on the way to H.Q.  Batteries were put into position on the Meaux road, and there was a general liveliness.

I got back from a hard but unexciting day’s work with the Cyclists to find that the Germans had got across in very fact, though not at Meaux, and that we were going to do a further bunk that night.  We cursed the gentle Germans heartily and well.  About 10.30 the three of us who were going on started.  We found some convoys on the way, delivered messages, and then I, who was leading, got badly lost in the big Villeneuve forest—­I forgot the name of it at the moment.[12] Of course I pretended that we were taking the shortest road, and luck, which is always with me when I’ve got to find anything, didn’t desert me that night.