I.

_March, 1919._

Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there are
naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief. I have just
described one of them. But I look back to others not less vivid--an
evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along
the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north and south of the
Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great building
at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the German Army
Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Prefecture; the eastern
battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel,
through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral
emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of
motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the
Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne
battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his
right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mezieres; General
Pershing in his office, and General Pershing _en petit comite_ in a
friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure,
with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant
eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished
rooms in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, where the British
General Staff worked during the war, when it was not moving in its
staff train up and down behind the front.

But I do not intend to make these letters a mere _omnium gatherum_ of
recollections. All through, my object has been to lay hold of the main
outline of what has happened on the Western front during the past
eleven months, and if I could, to make them clear to other civilians,
men and women, as clearly and rapidly as possible, in this interval
between the regime of _communiques_ and war-correspondence under which
we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories
which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now either
writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war.
Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British
Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of the
great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed.
There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time
to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare
which w