end of Armageddon. They looked for a lull, perhaps; very possibly some sort of conference and waste of time which would give the enemy breath for fresh enterprise. A few, however, insist that the careful destruction of the roads and railway-bridges and the indifference of the prisoners as they poured in warned them of the real state of affairs. ("It looked as if the Jerries had done all the harm they could think of, and were chucking it—like boys caught robbing an orchard. There wasn't an atom of dignity or decency about any of 'em. Just dirt and exhausted Jerrydom.") What the Battalion felt most was having to make detours round broken bridges, and to dig ramps in mine-craters on the roads to get their Lewis-guns across. They jettisoned their second-line transport at a convenient château outside Bavai on this account; found that there were no arrangements for billeting in the town, so made their own, and, while Bavai was being shelled, got into houses and again were "very comfortable." The 2nd Brigade were in the front line on the railway, and next day the 1st Brigade were to lead and capture Maubeuge, seven miles down a road which cut across the line of their earlier stages in the retreat from Mons, and three miles, as a shell ranges, from the village of Malplaquet.
They began their last day, half an hour after midnight, marching "as a battalion" out of Bavai with their Lewis-gun limbers. Twice they were slightly shelled; once at least they had to unpack and negotiate more mine-craters at cross-roads. It was a populous world through which they tramped, and all silently but tensely awake—a world made up of a straight, hard road humped above the level of the fields in places, rather like the Menin road when it was young, but with untouched tiled houses alongside. Here and there one heard the chatter of a machine-gun, as detached and irrelevant as the laugh of an idiot. It would cease, and a single field-gun would open as on some private quarrel. Then silence, and a suspicion, born out of the darkness, that the road was mined. Next, orders to the companies to spread themselves in different directions in the dark, to
