An officer described a retreat under fire as follows: "My platoon (fifty men) was some 200 yards behind the firing line to start with. I was soon ordered to bring them up, which was not a too comfortable job, as shells were bursting by now just in front of us. However, I shouted to the men, telling them to go on, and saying that they would be safer further up the hill. Then the battery doing most of the firing on us stopped for a moment to reload and resight, and I got the men on a hundred yards, and then the shells began bursting like hail just where we had come from. Then they kept altering their range from time to time, and you could sometimes hear the shot and shell come down only a few yards off, and of course you could always hear the shell singing through the air, and sometimes felt the breath of them. Around me the men behaved splendidly. (The whole regiment has been congratulated on its having done well.) We lay there in the potato crop like partridges. I think we were all too petrified to move; but where we were we lay just below the crest of a ridge waiting to crawl up to see to fire if any German infantry came along. We lay under that shell fire for three hours, and I think that none of us will ever forget the feeling of thinking that the next moment we might be dead--perhaps blown to atoms. I kept wondering what it was going to feel like to be dead, and all sorts of little things that I had done, and places I had been to years ago and had quite forgotten, kept passing through my mind. I have often heard of this happening to a drowning man, but have never experienced it before, and don't want to again! I think you get so strung up that your nerves get into an abnormal condition. My brain seemed extraordinarily cool and collected, which I was proud of and am still; but I looked at my hands and saw them moving and twisting in an extraordinary way, as if they didn't belong to me, and when I tried to use my field-glasses to spy at the Germans, it was as much as I could do with the greatest effort to get them up to my eyes, and then I could scarcely see. When the order to retire came our company got it late. I told my platoon--those who were left--to double back and assemble behind a house in a road behind us. I stopped behind to collect stragglers and to carry a couple of wounded into the house, where the doctor was seeing to them; and I believe I was the last to leave. By this time the bullets had begun to sing all round us, and the German infantry were getting close, so it was high time to clear out. I and a last party of five climbed up a pear tree and over a garden wall, and so, creeping along with the bullets now flying all round, we got over another wall and so up a path exposed for a short way. We ran along this, and I remember, as an instance of the stupid things one does in moments of excitement, my little hair-brush jumped out suddenly from my haversack, and I ran back five or six yards to pick it up, and risked a