At last we were pulled out of the line, at half an hour’s notice. Just before hooking in--the teams were on the position--there was a small S.O.S. lasting five minutes. My battery fired four hundred rounds in that time,--pretty good going for men who had come through such an inferno practically without sleep for fifteen days. We sat under a haystack in the rain for forty-eight hours and the Colonel gave us lectures on calibration. Most interesting! I confess to having been done in completely. The Babe’s death had been a frightful shock. His shoulder was touching mine as he got it and I had carried him spouting blood to the shelter of a bank. I wanted to get away and hide. I was afraid, not of death, but of going on in that living hell. I was unable to concentrate sufficiently to dictate the battery orders. I was unable to face the nine o’clock parade and left it to the Orderly Officer. The day’s routine made me so jumpy that I couldn’t go near the lines or the horses. The sight of a gun filled me with physical sickness. The effort of giving a definite order left me trembling all over. The greatest comfort I knew was to lie on my valise in the wet straw with closed eyes and listen to “Caprice Viennois” on the gramophone. It lifted one’s soul with gentle hands and bore it away into infinite space where all was quiet and full of eternal rest and beauty. It summed up the youth of the world, the springtime of love in all its fresh cleanness, like the sun after an April shower transforms the universe into magic colours. I think the subalterns guessed something of my trouble for they went out of their way to help me in little things. We marched north and went into the line again behind Albert, a murdered city whose skeleton melted before one’s eyes under the ceaseless rain of shells from our heavy artillery. During and since the retreat the cry on all sides was “Where the devil are the Americans?”--those mysterious Americans who were reported to be landing at the rate of seven a minute. What became of them after landing? They seemed to disappear. Some had seen them buying up Marseilles, and then painting Paris all colours of the rainbow, but no one had yet heard of them doing any fighting. The attitude was not very bright, until Pershing’s offer to Foch. Then everybody said, “Ah! _Now_ we shall see something.” Our own recruits seemed to be the dregs of England, untrained, weedy specimens who had never seen a gun and were incapable of learning. Yet we held the Hun all right. One looked for the huskies from U.S.A., however, with some anxiety.