It was then that Privates X., Y., Z. came to my aid. Private Z. had a request to make of me. It was that I should see to it that the black retriever of his regiment now at the front should be photographed, and that the photograph should appear in _The Daily Telegraph_. Private Z. had a temperature of 102·5, and looked it, but he was not worrying about that. He was worrying about the photograph of the regimental retriever, which I understood him to say, though dates make it almost incredible, had gone through the Boer campaign, and had not yet had his photograph in the papers. So I met by appointment Privates X., Y., and Z. outside the Hospice Général of Rouen, and by them was franked in to the hospital, where a few dozen of our wounded were sunning themselves. It was just time, and no more, as orders had been received a few minutes before that the British wounded were to be transferred from Rouen to London, for something grave was afoot. “Do you want to get back to England?” someone called out to a soldier whose arm was in a sling, and the whole sleeve of whose jacket had been ripped by the fragment of a shell. “Not I,” he shouted; “I want to go to the front again and get my sleeve back, and something more.” I managed to speak with two or three of the wounded as they were getting ready for the start. One of them, an artilleryman, had been injured by his horses falling on him at Ligny, I guessed it was--only guessed, for Tommy charges a French word as bravely and much less successfully than he charges the enemy. It was the same story that one hears from all, of a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds. “They were ten to one against us, in my opinion,” he said. “They were all over us. Their artillery found the range by means of aeroplanes. The shell fire was terrible.” He says that it was very accurate, but that fortunately the quality of the shells is not up to that of the shooting. My informant’s division held out for twenty-four hours against the overwhelming odds. Then, when the Germans had managed to get a battery into action behind, they retired during the night of Wednesday, steadily and in excellent order, keeping the German pursuit at bay. The next man I spoke to really spoke to me. He was anxious to tell his story. “I have been in the thick of it,” he said; “in the very thick of it. I was one of the chauffeurs in the service of the British General Staff.” He told me that he was not a Regular soldier, but a volunteer from the Automobile Club, an American who had become a naturalised English citizen, and had once been a journalist. His own injury, a burnt arm, was from a back-fire, but his escape from the German bullets had been almost miraculous. Three staff officers, one after another, had been hit in the body of the car behind him. This is his story: