The battle of the Aisne passed by slow degrees out of their hands, and the English found themselves fighting their extraordinary first fight for Ypres. They stood between the Germans and the Channel ports as thinly as a Japanese screen, between England and the Atlantic. The very camp cooks were in the trenches. Time fled like a long thunderous hour. It was a storm that flashed and fell and returned again. Winn was beginning to feel tired now. He hardly slept at night, and by day his brain moved as if it were made of red-hot steel, flying rapidly from expedient to expedient, facing the hourly problems of that wild and wet October, how to keep men alive who never rested, who were too few, who took the place of guns. He wrote more seldom now, and once he said, "We are having rather a hard time, but we shall get through with it." Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct, and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the more readily to adapt the changes of the hour. They remade their external world, out of this new warfare. They remade it at the cost of their lives in Flanders, in the face of incredulous enemies and criticizing neutrals, painstakingly, without science, doggedly out of their own wills. They held Ypres by a thread, and when it seemed that nothing could keep it, one cold and dreadful day along the Menin road came up their reinforcements. First one group and then another of tall, dark people, silent footed as falling leaves, turbaned black faces, eyes of appalling and unearthly gravity, hearts half like a rock and half like a child, alien captive people of another blood, took their place silently, regiment by regiment blocking up the dreadful gaps with their guns, their rifles, and the free gift of their lives. "Lionel has come," Winn wrote, "and all my men. I never was so glad of anything, but you. Send me all the warm things you can. The winter will be quite jolly now when the men get used to the trenches. It's a funny thing, but they've given me command of the regiment. I hadn't expected it, but I've always liked handling Sikhs. Whatever happens, you'll remember that I've been an awfully lucky chap, won't you?" CHAPTER XXXI Lionel and Winn talked of the regiment and the war; these two things filled the exacting hours. In a world a very long way off and in the depths of their hearts were England and Claire. They spent three weeks in the trenches, blackened and water clogged and weary. It was the darkest time of a dark December, the water was up to their waists, there was no draining the treacherous clay surfaces. The men suffered to the limit of their vitality and sometimes passed it; they needed constant care and watching. It had to be explained to them that they were not required to give up their lives to spirits, in a land that worshiped idols. Behind the strange lights and noises heralding death there were solid people who ate sausages, and could be killed.