“One very seldom sees any of them, worse luck.
“I hope you are taking great care of yourself and not worrying. Your loving Winn.”
In the weeks that followed, Claire got many letters. They were short letters, written in flying motors, in trains, in outhouses, in romantic châteaux; but they all began in the same reassuring way. “I am very well, and we are getting on quite nicely.”
The Allied line was being flung out in wild curves and swoops like the flight of a dove before a hawk; from Soissons up toward Calais they fenced and circled.
They retook Rheims, they seized Amiens. Lille fell from them and Laon.
The battle of the Aisne passed by slow degrees out of their hands, and the English found themselves fighting their extraordinary first fight for Ypres. They stood between the Germans and the Channel ports as thinly as a Japanese screen, between England and the Atlantic. The very camp cooks were in the trenches.
Time fled like a long thunderous hour. It was a storm that flashed and fell and returned again.
Winn was beginning to feel tired now. He hardly slept at night, and by day his brain moved as if it were made of red-hot steel, flying rapidly from expedient to expedient, facing the hourly problems of that wild and wet October, how to keep men alive who never rested, who were too few, who took the place of guns. He wrote more seldom now, and once he said, “We are having rather a hard time, but we shall get through with it.”
Fortunately all Englishmen are born with a curious pioneer instinct, and being the least adaptable people in the world, they have learned the more readily to adapt the changes of the hour.
They remade their external world, out of this new warfare.