I'm going to start by giving you an account of what we thought of the military situation during the great marches and the battle of the Aisne--for my own use. What happened we shall be able to look up afterwards in some lumbersome old history, should we forget, but, unless I get down quickly what we thought, it will disappear in after-knowledge. You will remember how the night we arrived on the Aisne Huggie and I stretched ourselves on a sand-heap at the side of the road--just above Ciry--and watched dim columns of Germans crawling like grey worms up the slopes the other side of the valley. We were certain that the old Division was still in hot cry on the heels of a rapidly retreating foe. News came--I don't know how: you never do--that our transport and ammunition were being delayed by the fearsome and lamentable state of the roads. But the cavalry was pushing on ahead, and tired infantry were stumbling in extended order through the soaked fields on either side of us. There was hard gunnery well into the red dusk. Right down the valley came the thunder of it, and we began to realise that divisions, perhaps even corps, had come up on either flank. The ancient captain of cuirassiers, who had hauled me out of my shrine into the rain that afternoon, made me understand there was a great and unknown number of French on our left. From the Order before the Marne I had learnt that a French Army had turned the German right, but the first news I had had of French on our own right was when one staff-officer said in front of me that the French away to the east had been held up. That was at Doue. Our retreat had been solitary. The French, everybody thought, had left us in the lurch at Mons and again at Le Cateau, when the cavalry we knew to be there refused to help us. For all we knew the French Army had been swept off the face of the earth. We were just retiring, and retiring before three or four times our own numbers. We were not even supported by the 1st Corps on our right. It was smashed, and had all it could do to get itself away. We might have been the Ten Thousand. But the isolation of our desperate retreat dismayed nobody, for we all had an unconquerable belief in the future. There must be some French somewhere, and in spite--as we thought then--of our better judgments, we stuck to the story that was ever being circulated: "We are luring the Germans into a trap." It was impressed upon us, too, by "the Div." that both at Mons and Le Cateau we were strategically victorious. We had given the Germans so hard a knock that they could not pursue us at once; we had covered the retirement of the 1st Corps; we had got away successfully ourselves. We were sullen and tired victors, never defeated. If we retreated, it was for a purpose. If we advanced, the Germans were being crushed. The Germans thought we were beaten, because they didn't realise we knew we were victorious the whole time.