I was up yesterday afternoon trying to find out a certain T.M. battery, and what should fly by quite close and quite unconcerned but a duck! We were not very high, and it was very misty. The duck just appeared, with his neck stretched out, eager and oblivious. And then vanished into the mist again. I was thinking about that duck too much to find out what I wanted. Anyway, it was a fruitless journey. But flying amongst clouds is very beautiful. Sometimes we got above the clouds, to where the sun was functioning away as efficiently as ever. The clouds looked like millions of feather beds. _March 2._ I have been doing some drawings of R.F.C. officers. They love being "took" out here, and my office is rapidly degenerating into a club, which makes work no easier. Well, you see from the papers what is happening. The Boche retires to the Hindenburg Line, and we follow. I should so love to tell you all about it, but Mum's the word. A great moral defeat for poor Fritz, anyway. The cavalry are sharpening their swords. The aeroplanes sail high up in the blue, like hungry hawks. _March 5._ I am probably going off to-morrow. Now, where do you think? Paris? Madrid? Anything of that sort? Wrong again. Shall I tell you? VICTORIA. I'll send you a telegram directly I get across the briny. And I plead for no "back from the war tea-parties," please! * * * * * [Illustration: PERONNE From BIACHES A few days after the evacuation. From a distance the place looked almost intact, as some of the outside walls had been left standing. That white building in the centre of the town was once the cathedral. MONT ST. QUENTIN on the left. The thin white lines on the slopes beyond are trenches.] _March 22._ [Sidenote: THE HUN RETREAT] The Hun rearguards are now well beyond ----. I knew the place so intimately from photographs, and from high up in the air, that a view of it from terra-firma promised to be quite interesting. So with great eagerness, some sandwiches, and the faithful sketchbook, I sallied forth. Harry came, too. A glorious day of brilliant sun and brief snowstorms. From the aerodrome through all this devastated country, past wrecked villages, orchards laid waste, dug-out camps, bivouac camps, R.E. dumps, light railways, battered trollies lying on their sides, and all the ugly confusion of old wire rusted a red-hot colour, bits of corrugated iron, bits of netting screens, more wire, dead horses, dead men in all stages of decomposition, legs, hands, heads scattered anywhere, dead trees, mud, broken rifles, gas-bags, tin helmets, bully-beef tins, derelict trenches, derelict telephone wires, grenades, aerial torpedoes, all the toys of war, broken and useless. Tommy, the dear hairies, and the R.E. dumps, to remind you what vast stores of everything are still being accumulated.