We stayed there two days, doing nothing but water and feed the horses and sleep. I succeeded in getting letters home the first morning, having the luck to meet a junior Brass Hat who had done the retreat in a motor-car. It was good to be able to put an end to their anxiety. Considering all things we had been extraordinarily lucky. The number of our dead, wounded and missing was comparatively slight and the missing rolled up later, most of them. On the second night at about two in the morning, Battery Commanders were summoned urgently to Brigade Headquarters. The Colonel had gone, leaving the bloodthirsty Major in command. It transpired that a Divisional brigade plus one battery of ours was to go back into the line. They would take our best guns, some of our best teams and our best sergeants. The exchanges were to be carried out at once. They were. We marched away that day, leaving one battery behind. As it happened, it didn’t go into the line again but rejoined us a week later. The third phase of the retreat, marching back to the British area--we were far south into the French area at Chevrincourt, which is near Compiègne, and all its signboards showed Paris so many kilometres away--gave us an impression of the backwash of war. The roads were full, not of troops, but of refugees, women, old men, girls and children, with what possessions they could load into a farm wagon piled sky high. They pulled their cattle along by chains or ropes tied round their horns. Some of them pushed perambulators full of packages and carried their babies. Others staggered under bundles. Grief marked their faces. The hope of return kept them going. The French have deeper roots in the soil than we. To them their “_patelin_” is the world and all the beauty thereof. It was a terrible sight to see those poor women trudging the endless roads, void of a goal as long as they kept away from the pursuing death, half starved, sleeping unwashed in leaky barns, regardless of sex, begging milk from the inhabited villages they passed through to satisfy their unhappy babies, managing somehow to help the aged and infirm who mumbled bitter curses at the “_sale Boche_” and “_soixante-dix_.” I heard one woman say “_Nous savons c’qu c’est que la guerre! Nous avons tout fait excepté les tranchées._” “We know what war is. We have done everything except the trenches.” Bombarded with gas and long-range guns, bombed by aeroplanes, homeless, half starved, the graves of their dead pillaged by ghoul-like Huns, their sons, husbands, and lovers killed, indeed they knew the meaning of war. England has been left in merciful ignorance of this side of war, but woe unto her if she ever forgets that these women of France are her blood-sisters, these peasant women who later gave food to the emaciated Tommies who staggered back starving after the armistice, food of which they denied themselves and their children.