At Peronne, from which the newly returned inhabitants had a second time fled, the battle seemed to be at the doors.  There I had news of my division.  It was farther south towards St Christ.  We groped our way among bad roads to where its headquarters were believed to be, while the voice of the guns grew louder.  They turned out to be those of another division, which was busy getting ready to cross the river.  Then the dark fell, and while airplanes flew west into the sunset there was a redder sunset in the east, where the unceasing flashes of gunfire were pale against the angry glow of burning dumps.  The sight of the bonnet-badge of a Scots Fusilier made me halt, and the man turned out to belong to my division.  Half an hour later I was taking over from the much-relieved Masterton in the ruins of what had once been a sugar-beet factory.

There to my surprise I found Lefroy.  The Boche had held him prisoner for precisely eight hours.  During that time he had been so interested in watching the way the enemy handled an attack that he had forgotten the miseries of his position.  He described with blasphemous admiration the endless wheel by which supplies and reserve troops move up, the silence, the smoothness, the perfect discipline.  Then he had realized that he was a captive and unwounded, and had gone mad.  Being a heavy-weight boxer of note, he had sent his two guards spinning into a ditch, dodged the ensuing shots, and found shelter in the lee of a blazing ammunition dump where his pursuers hesitated to follow.  Then he had spent an anxious hour trying to get through an outpost line, which he thought was Boche.  Only by overhearing an exchange of oaths in the accents of Dundee did he realize that it was our own . . .  It was a comfort to have Lefroy back, for he was both stout-hearted and resourceful.  But I found that I had a division only on paper.  It was about the strength of a brigade, the brigades battalions, and the battalions companies.

* * * * *

This is not the place to write the story of the week that followed.  I could not write it even if I wanted to, for I don’t know it.  There was a plan somewhere, which you will find in the history books, but with me it was blank chaos.  Orders came, but long before they arrived the situation had changed, and I could no more obey them than fly to the moon.  Often I had lost touch with the divisions on both flanks.  Intelligence arrived erratically out of the void, and for the most part we worried along without it.  I heard we were under the French—­first it was said to be Foch, and then Fayolle, whom I had met in Paris.  But the higher command seemed a million miles away, and we were left to use our mother wits.  My problem was to give ground as slowly as possible and at the same time not to delay too long, for retreat we must, with the Boche sending in brand-new divisions each morning.  It was a kind of war worlds distant from the old trench battles, and since I had been taught no other I had to invent rules as I went along.  Looking back, it seems a miracle that any of us came out of it.  Only the grace of God and the uncommon toughness of the British soldier bluffed the Hun and prevented him pouring through the breach to Abbeville and the sea.  We were no better than a mosquito curtain stuck in a doorway to stop the advance of an angry bull.