_Re_ America. It doesn't look much as if they were coming in now, does it? However, one of the Scots Guards gave me June as the end of the war. He offered me 10 to 1 in francs; but, as I am always rather muddled as to whether that means that he gives me 10 francs if I win, or I give him 1 franc if I lose, or what, I declined to bet. I expect he thinks I don't bet on principle. But, anyway, let's hope he wins.
The worst of this game is that now I feel I want to do it all myself. I really do know a fair amount about the Boche lines, and I long to spend a day wandering about there taking notes!
I was up yesterday afternoon trying to find out a certain T.M. battery, and what should fly by quite close and quite unconcerned but a duck! We were not very high, and it was very misty. The duck just appeared, with his neck stretched out, eager and oblivious. And then vanished into the mist again. I was thinking about that duck too much to find out what I wanted. Anyway, it was a fruitless journey. But flying amongst clouds is very beautiful. Sometimes we got above the clouds, to where the sun was functioning away as efficiently as ever. The clouds looked like millions of feather beds.
I have been doing some drawings of R.F.C. officers. They love being "took" out here, and my office is rapidly degenerating into a club, which makes work no easier.
Well, you see from the papers what is happening. The Boche retires to the Hindenburg Line, and we follow.
I should so love to tell you all about it, but Mum's the word. A great moral defeat for poor Fritz, anyway.
The aeroplanes sail high up in the blue, like hungry hawks.
I am probably going off to-morrow. Now, where do you think? Paris? Madrid? Anything of that sort?
I'll send you a telegram directly I get across the briny.
And I plead for no "back from the war tea-parties," please!
[Illustration: PERONNE From BIACHES A few days after the evacuation. From a distance the place looked almost intact, as some of the outside walls had been left standing. That white building in the centre of the town was once the cathedral. MONT ST. QUENTIN on the left. The thin white lines on the slopes beyond are trenches.]
The Hun rearguards are now well beyond ----. I knew the place so intimately from photographs, and from high up in the air, that a view of it from terra-firma promised to be quite interesting.