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Updated: June 8, 2025
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.
Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud; lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud, motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever through the endless mud.
I have only a dim remembrance of what happened there. I went into the signal-office and reported that, so far as I knew, the 5th Division was in flight along the Reumont-Saint-Quentin road. The sergeant in charge of the 2nd Corps Motor-cyclists offered us some hard-boiled eggs and put me in charge of our lot.
He was riding along about three hundred yards behind two motor-cyclists. Suddenly he saw them stop abruptly and put up their hands. He fled. A little farther on he came to a village and asked for coffee. He heard that Uhlans had been there a few hours before, and was taken to see a woman who had been shot through the breast.
Soberly clad burgesses, bearded, amiable, and in no fatal hurry; well-kept men of the world swirling by in miraculous limousines; legless cripples flopping on hands and leather pads; thin-whiskered students in velveteen; walrus-moustached veterans in broadcloth; keen-faced old prelates; shabby young priests; cavalrymen in casque and cuirass; workingmen turned horse and harnessed to carts; sidewalk jesters, itinerant vendors of questionable wares; shady loafers dressed to resemble gold-showering America; motor-cyclists in leather; hairy musicians, blue gendarmes, baggy red zouaves; purple-faced, glazed- hatted, scarlet-waistcoated, cigarette-smoking cabmen, calling one another "onions," "camels," and names even more terrible.
We were the first motor-cyclists in our part of the world to appear in flaring chrome. The Q.-B. smiled again. I always think the Quarter-Bloke is wasted. He ought to be put in charge of the Looting Department of a large invading army. Do not misunderstand me. The Q.-B. never "looted." He never stepped a hair's-breadth outside those regulations that hedge round the Quartermaster.
A number of motor-cyclists had been employed in the quest of intelligence, and one item of the news they had to tell was that Colchester had offered resistance to the invaders, and as a result had been shelled and burned to the ground.
We had been advancing or retiring without a break since my tragic farewell to Nadine. We had been riding all day and often all night. But those were heroic days, and now as I write this in our comfortable slack winter quarters, I must confess I would give anything to have them all over again. Now we motor-cyclists are middle-aged warriors. Adventures are work. Experiences are a routine.
The streets were, in fact, full of infantry, lying about or sitting along the houses on both sides. In the middle of the main road was a crowd of galloping orderlies, cyclists and motor-cyclists. I felt rather bewildered in all this bustle. However, these people seemed to know where they were going. They were, no doubt, carrying orders or information.
Desperately we got up to look round for some shelter, and George, our champion "scrounger," discovered a chicken-house. It is true there were nineteen fowls in it. They died a silent and, I hope, a painless death. The order came round that the motor-cyclists were to spend the night at the cottage the roads were utterly and hopelessly impassable while the rest of the company was to go on.
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