say, modifying a direct
statement of fact into a vague surmise, taking away the honor due to
the heroic men who had fought and died to-day... Who would be a war
correspondent, or a censor?

So it happened day by day, for five months at a stretch, when big
battles were in progress. It was not an easy life. There were times when
I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I could hardly rouse
myself to a new day's effort. There were times when I was faint and sick
and weak; and my colleagues were like me. But we struggled on to tell
the daily history of the war and the public cursed us because we did not
tell more, or sneered at us because they thought we were "spoon-fed" by
G. H. Q.--who never gave us any news and who were far from our way of
life, except when they thwarted us, by petty restrictions and foolish
rules.

VIII

The Commander-in-Chief--Sir John French--received us when we were first
attached to the British armies in the field--a lifetime ago, as it seems
to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the chateau near St.-Omer, which
he used as his own headquarters, with his A. D. C.'s in attendance,
though the main general headquarters were in the town. Our first colonel
gathered us like a shepherd with his flock, counting us twice over
before we passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew afterward to be
Sir Philip Sassoon, received us and chatted pleasantly in a French
salon with folding-doors which shut off an inner room. There were a
few portraits of ladies and gentlemen of France in the days before the
Revolution, like those belonging to that old aristocracy which still
existed, in poverty and pride, in other chateaus in this French
Flanders. There was a bouquet of flowers on the table, giving a sweet
scent to the room, and sunlight streamed through the shutters... I
thought for a moment of the men living in ditches in the salient, under
harassing fire by day and night. Their actions and their encounters with
death were being arranged, without their knowledge, in this sunny little
chateau....

The folding-doors opened and Sir John French came in. He wore top-boots
and spurs, and after saying, "Good day, gentlemen," stood with his legs
apart, a stocky, soldierly figure, with a square head and heavy jaw. I
wondered whether there were any light of genius in him--any inspiration,
any force which would break the awful strength of the enemy against us,
any cunning in modern warfare.

He coughed