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I was up early and managed to get a wash at the station-master's house, his wife providing me with coffee, which, much to my discomfiture, she liberally dosed with rum. At 6.30 Johnson started on a message to the 15th Brigade. We never saw him again. At 9.15 three despatch riders who had gone to the 15th, George, Johnson, and Grimers, had not returned. I was sent.
Wounded men from the firing line told us that the shrapnel was unbearable in the trenches. A man came galloping up wildly from the Heavies. They had run out of fuses. Already we had sent urgent messages to the ammunition lorries, but the road was blocked and they could not get up to us. So Grimers was sent off with a haversack mine to fetch fuses and hurry up the lorries.
We bivouacked on the drive, but the hardness of our bed didn't matter, as we were out all night all of us, including the two, Grimers and Cecil. It was nervous riding in the forest. All the roads looked exactly alike, and down every glade we expected a shot from derelict Uhlans. That night I thought out plots for at least four stories.
N'Soon opened his throttle and darted forward, foolishly. The shell exploded. Grimers' bicycle was covered with branches and he with earth and dust. N'Soon for some reason was not touched. The General and his staff were shelled nearly the whole way to the farm, but nobody was hit.
There we took a wrong turning and found ourselves in a blackberry lane. It was the hottest, pleasantest of days, and forgetting all about the more serious things we could not even hear the guns we filled up with the softest, ripest of fruit. Three of us rode together, N'Soon, Grimers, and myself. I don't know how we found our way.
Tommy, then attached, took refuge in the cellar. According to his own account, when he woke up in the morning he was floating. The house had some corners taken off it and all the glass was shattered, but no one was hurt. When I returned to Bailleul, Divisional Headquarters were about to move. A puncture kept me at Bailleul after the others had gone on to Locre. Grimers stood by to help.
The day St Marguerite was shelled one of the two brigadiers determined to shift his headquarters to a certain farm. N'Soon and Grimers were attached to the brigade at the time. "Headquarters" came to the corner. N'Soon and Grimers were riding slowly in front. They heard a shell coming. Grimers flung himself off his bicycle and dropped like a stone.
Grimers, under the Skipper's instructions, began to plant vegetables for the spring, but I do not think he ever got much beyond mustard and cress. On particularly unpleasant days we were told off to make fascines. N'Soon assisted the Quartermaster-Sergeant. Cecil did vague things with the motor-lorry. I was called upon to write the Company's War Diary.
There we slept comfortably in the lodge of the chateau, all, that is, except Grimers, who had been seized with a puncture just outside the main hotel in Villers-Cotterets.
The dawn was just breaking when we set out to halt a hundred yards or so along. There we shivered for half an hour with nothing but a pipe and a scrap of chocolate that had got stuck at the bottom of my greatcoat pocket. Finally, the motor-cyclists, to their great relief, were told that they might go on ahead. The Grimers and I cut across a country to get away from the column.
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