We war correspondents had suffered mental
agonies like all who knew what had happened better than the troops
themselves. Every day after the first break-through we pushed out in
different directions--Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes
until we came up with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back
and back, day after day, with increasing speed, until it drew very
close to Amiens. It was a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It
was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying
to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed
by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and
sticks these soldier-ants of ours, in the whole world behind our
front-lines, were trying to rescue heavy guns, motor-lorries, tanks,
ambulances, hospital stores, ordnance stores, steam-rollers,
agricultural implements, transport wagons, railway engines, Y.M.C.A.
tents, gun-horse and mule columns, while rear-guard actions were being
fought within gunfire of them and walking wounded were hobbling back
along the roads in this uproar of traffic, and word came that a
further retreat was happening and that the enemy had broken through
again .
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