It was the dismallest morning, dark as if the sun would never rise, chequered with little bursts of heavy rain.  The road was black with mud.  The hedges dripped audibly into watery ditches.  There was no grass, only a plentiful coarse vegetation.  The valley itself seemed enclosed by unpleasant hills from joy or light.  Soldiers lined the road—­some were dead, contorted, or just stretched out peacefully; some were wounded, and they moaned as I passed along.  There was one officer who slowly moved his head from side to side.  That was all he could do.  But I could not stop; the ambulances were coming up.  So I splashed rapidly through the mud to the cross-roads north of Montreuil.

To the right was a barn in which the Germans had slept.  It was littered with their equipment.  And in front of it was a derelict motor-car dripping in the rain.

At Montreuil we had a scrap of bully with a bit of biscuit for breakfast, then we ploughed slowly and dangerously alongside the column to Dhuizy, where a house that our artillery had fired was still burning.  The chalked billeting marks of the Germans were still on the doors of the cottages.  I had a despatch to take back along the column to the Heavies.  Grease a couple of inches thick carpeted the road.  We all agreed that we should be useless in winter.

At Dhuizy the sun came out.

A couple of miles farther on I had a talk with two German
prisoners—­R.A.M.C.  They were sick of the war.  Summed it up thus: 

Wir weissen nichts:  wir essen nichts:  immer laufen, laufen, laufen.

In bright sunshine we pushed on towards Gandeln.  On the way we had a bit of lunch, and I left a pipe behind.  As there was nothing doing I pushed on past the column, waiting for a moment to watch some infantry draw a large wood, and arrived with the cavalry at Gandeln, a rakish old town at the bottom of an absurdly steep hill.  Huggie passed me with a message.  Returning he told me that the road ahead was pitiably disgusting.

You must remember that we were hotly pursuing a disorganised foe.  In front the cavalry and horse artillery were harassing them for all they were worth, and whenever there was an opening our bigger guns would gallop up for a trifle of blue murder.

From Gandeln the road rises sharply through woods and then runs on high ground without a vestige of cover for two and a half miles into Chezy.  On this high, open ground our guns caught a German convoy, and we saw the result.

First there were a few dead and wounded Germans, all muddied.  The men would look curiously at each, and sometimes would laugh.  Then at the top of the hill we came upon some smashed and abandoned waggons.  These were hastily looted.  Men piled themselves with helmets, greatcoats, food, saddlery, until we looked a crowd of dishevelled bandits.  The German wounded watched—­they lay scattered in a cornfield, like poppies.  Sometimes Tommy is not a pleasant animal, and I hated him that afternoon.  One dead German had his pockets full of chocolate.  They scrambled over him, pulling him about, until it was all divided.