How did he handle his men and junior officers? They seemed to like him “this side idolatry,” yet he had a grip on them, and demanded obedience, which they gave with respect. Queer! My kid-brother had learned the trick of command. He had an iron hand under a velvet glove. The line of his jaw, his straight nose (made straighter by that boxing in his old Oxford days) were cut out for a job like this. He looked the part. He was born to it. All his training had led up to this soldier’s job in the field, though I had not guessed so when I wheeled him in that old go-cart. For me he had a slight contempt, which he will deny when he reads this preface. Though a writer of books before the war, he had now the soldier’s scorn of the chronicler. It hurt him to see my green arm-band, my badge of shame. That I had a motor-car seemed to him, in his stationary exile, the sign of a soft job--as, compared with his, it was--disgraceful in its luxury. From time to time I saw him, and, in spite of many narrow escapes under heavy shelling, he did not change, but was splendidly cheerful. Even on the eve of the great German offensive in March of 1918, when he took me to see his guns dug in under the embankment south of St. Quentin, he did not seem apprehensive of the awful ordeal ahead of him. I knew more than he did about that. I knew the time and place of its coming, and I knew that he was in a very perilous position. We said “so long” to each other at parting, with a grip of hands, and I thought it might be the last time I should see him. It was I think ten days later when I saw him, and in that time much had happened, and all that time I gave him up as lost. Under the overwhelming weight of numbers--114 Divisions to 48--the British line had broken, and fighting desperately, day by day, our men fell back mile after mile with the enemy outflanking them, cutting off broken battalions, threatening to cut off vast bodies of men. Every day I was in the swirl of that Retreat, pushing up to its rearguards, seeing with increasing dismay the fearful wreckage of our organization and machine of war which became for a little while like the broken springs of a watch, with Army, Corps, and Divisional staffs, entirely out of touch with the fighting units owing to the break-down of all lines of communication. In that tide of traffic, of men, and guns, and transport, I made a few inquiries about that brother of mine. Nobody had seen, or heard of his battery. I must have been close to him at times in Noyon, and Guiscard and Ham, but one individual was like a needle in a bunch of hay, and the enemy had rolled over in a tide, and there did not seem to me a chance of his escape. Then, one morning, in a village near Poix, when I asked a gunner-officer whether he had seen my brother’s battery, he said, “Yes--two villages up that road.” “Do you happen to know Major Gibbs?” “Yes.... I saw him walking along there a few minutes ago.”