re reduced to two or three, and the gaps were filled up from the
reserve depots. I was afraid to ask, "Where is So-and-so?" because I
knew that the best answer would be, "A Blighty wound," and the worst was
more likely.

It was the duration of all the drama of death that seared one's soul as
an onlooker; the frightful sum of sacrifice that we were recording day
by day. There were times when it became intolerable and agonizing, and
when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace by negotiation,
by compromise, that the river of blood might cease to flow. The men
looked so splendid as they marched up to the lines, singing, whistling,
with an easy swing. They looked so different when thousands came down
again, to field dressing-stations--the walking wounded and the stretcher
cases, the blind and the gassed--as we saw them on the mornings of
battle, month after month, year after year.

Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether "soft," though
we did not go "over the top" or live in the dirty ditches with them. We
had to travel prodigiously to cover the ground between one division and
another along a hundred miles of front, with long walks often at the
journey's end and a wet way back. Sometimes we were soaked to the skin
on the journey home. Often we were so cold and numbed in those long wild
drives up desolate roads that our limbs lost consciousness and the wind
cut into us like knives. We were working against time, always against
time, and another tire-burst would mean that no despatch could be
written of a great battle on the British front, or only a short record
written in the wildest haste when there was so much to tell, so much
to describe, such unforgetable pictures in one's brain of another day's
impressions in the fields and on the roads.

There were five English correspondents and, two years later, two
Americans. On mornings of big battle we divided up the line of front and
drew lots for the particular section which each man would cover. Then
before the dawn, or in the murk of winter mornings, or the first glimmer
of a summer day, our cars would pull out and we would go off separately
to the part of the line allotted to us by the number drawn, to see the
preliminary bombardment, to walk over newly captured ground, to get into
the backwash of prisoners and walking wounded, amid batteries firing
a new barrage, guns moving forward on days of good advance, artillery
transport bringing up new st