He bestowed on me in official moments the most wonderful title, that even Haig might have been proud of. He called me “_Monsieur le Commandant des armées anglaises à Bergicourt_,”--a First Command indeed! Christmas Day was a foot deep in snow, wonderfully beautiful and silent with an almost canny stillness. The Colonel and the Intelligence Officer came and had dinner with us in the middle of the day, after the Colonel had made a little speech to the men, who were sitting down to theirs, and been cheered to the echo. At night there was a concert and the battery got royally tight. It was the first time they’d been out of action for eight months and it probably did them a power of good. Four Christmases back I had been in Florida splashing about in the sea, revelling in being care free, deep in the writing of a novel. It was amazing how much water had flowed under the bridges since then,--one in Fontainehouck, one in Salonica, one in London, and now this one at Bergicourt with six guns and a couple of hundred men under me. I wondered where the next would be and thought of New York with a sigh. If anyone had told me in Florida that I should ever be a Major in the British Army I should have thought he’d gone mad. 19 The time was spent in Poix in completing ourselves with all the things of which the batteries were short--technical stores--in making rings in the snow and exercising the horses, in trying to get frost nails without success, in a comic _chasse au sanglier_ organised by a local sportsman in which we saw nothing but a big red fox and a hare and bagged neither, in endeavouring to camouflage the fuel stolen by the men, in wondering what 1918 would bring forth. The bitter cold lasted day after day without any sign of a break and in the middle of it came the order to move. We were wanted back in the line again. I suppose there is always one second of apprehension on receiving that order, of looking round with the thought, “Whose turn this time?” There seemed to be no hope or sign of peace. The very idea was so remote as to be stillborn. Almost it seemed as if one would have to go on and on for ever. The machine had run away with us and there was no stopping it. Every calendar that ran out was another year of one’s youth burnt on the altar of war. There was no future. How could there be when men were falling like leaves in autumn?