I don’t know whether you have seen the picture of the retreat from Moscow, showing everybody going along in a drove, this, that, and the other way. You know it? Well, that wasn’t a patch on some parts of the great retirement on Paris; but there was this enormous difference, that the retreat from Moscow was just that and nothing more, while our retirement was simply the beginning of what was to be a splendid victory. It led up to the present tremendous fighting and this terrific trench work; and let me say that it is impossible for anybody who has not taken part in that trench warfare to realise what it means. Words and pictures will enable you to understand the life to some extent, but only by sharing in it will you fully realise its awful meaning. But I’m not grumbling--I’m only stating a fact. Trench life is hard and dismal work, especially in a winter like this; but everything that it has been possible to do for the British soldier by the folk at home has been done. Look at this--one of the new skin coats that have been served out to us. This is the way we wear it--yes, it certainly does smell, but it’s goat-skin, and might have done with a bit more curing--and I can tell you that it takes a lot of even the wet and wind of the Low Countries to get through the fur and skin. These coats are splendid, and a perfect godsend. I won’t attempt to tell you about things exactly as they happened; I’ll talk of them just as they come into my mind, so that you can understand what the Royal West Kents have done. I can speak, I hope, as a fully-trained soldier, for I served eight years with the colours and two years in the Reserve before I was called up, and I did seven years abroad, in China, Singapore, and India; so I had got into the way of observing things that interest a soldier. Well, one of my first and worst experiences was when at about ten-thirty at night the order for a general retirement was given, but through some mistake that order did not reach a sergeant and fourteen of the West Kents, of whom I was one, and it was not until just before four o’clock in the morning that we got the word, and began to try and pull ourselves out of it. The Germans were then not more than eighty yards away from us, and our position was desperate. To make matters worse, the bridge by which we had to get across a neighbouring canal had been blown up, but as it happened the detonator on the overhead part of the bridge had not exploded, so that there was still a sort of communication across the water. The bridge was full of wire entanglements and broken chains--a mass of metal wreckage--and the only way of crossing was to scramble along the ruins and crawl along what had been the iron parapet, which was only eight or nine inches wide. You will best understand what I mean if you imagine one of the iron bridges over the Thames destroyed, and that the principal thing left is the flat-topped iron side which you often see.