Sometimes whole regiments entrained under the care of fatherly French railway officials, curiously liable to hysteria on ordinary excursion days, but now as calm as Egyptian Pyramids in the face of national disaster. They pieced together with marvelous ingenuity the broken thread of speech presented to them by the occasional French scholars upon the British Staff; but more often still they shook polite and emphatic heads, and explained that there quite simply were no trains. The possible, yes; but the impossible, no. One could not create trains. So the men went on marching. They did not like retreating, but they moved as if they were on parade in front of Buckingham Palace, and when they held, they fought as winners fight. It was not until they reached the Marne that Winn found time to write to Claire. "We are getting on very nicely," he wrote. "I hope you are not worrying about us. We have plenty to eat, though we have to take our meals a little hurriedly. "There is a good deal of work to do. "This war is the best thing that ever happened to me--bar one. Before I came out I thought I should go to pieces. I feel quite free to write to you now. I do not think there can be any harm in it, so I hope you won't mind. If things do not seem to be going very well with us at first, remember that they never do. "Every campaign I ever went in for, we were short-handed to start with, and had to fight against odds, which doesn't matter really if you have the right men, but always takes longer and looks discouraging to outsiders. The men are very good and I am glad the War Office let me commandeer the boots I wanted--the kind they offered me at first wouldn't have done at all for this sort of work. It is rather hard not being with the men more, but the work is very absorbing, so I do not mind as much as I did. "I think the regiment will come out later, and they have promised to let me go back into it. I am sorry about the villages. It's a pity the Germans slopped over into France at all. I found two Uhlans yesterday in a farmyard; they had been behaving badly, so I did them both in. "One very seldom sees any of them, worse luck. "I hope you are taking great care of yourself and not worrying. Your loving Winn." In the weeks that followed, Claire got many letters. They were short letters, written in flying motors, in trains, in outhouses, in romantic chateaux; but they all began in the same reassuring way. "I am very well, and we are getting on quite nicely." The Allied line was being flung out in wild curves and swoops like the flight of a dove before a hawk; from Soissons up toward Calais they fenced and circled. They retook Rheims, they seized Amiens. Lille fell from them and Laon.