"This war is the best thing that ever happened to me—bar one. Before I came out I thought I should go to pieces. I feel quite free to write to you now. I do not think there can be any harm in it, so I hope you won't mind. If things do not seem to be going very well with us at first, remember that they never do.
"Every campaign I ever went in for, we were short-handed to start with, and had to fight against odds, which doesn't matter really if you have the right men, but always takes longer and looks discouraging to outsiders. The men are very good and I am glad the War Office let me commandeer the boots I wanted—the kind they offered me at first wouldn't have done at all for this sort of work. It is rather hard not being with the men more, but the work is very absorbing, so I do not mind as much as I did.
"I think the regiment will come out later, and they have promised to let me go back into it. I am sorry about the villages. It's a pity the Germans slopped over into France at all. I found two Uhlans yesterday in a farmyard; they had been behaving badly, so I did them both in.
"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.