actions day by day, though I had to leave out
something of the underlying horror of them all, in spite of my continual
emphasis, by temperament and by conviction, on the tragedy of all this
sacrifice of youth. The only alternative to what we wrote would have
been a passionate denunciation of all this ghastly slaughter and violent
attacks on British generalship. Even now I do not think that would have
been justified. As Bernard Shaw told me, "while the war lasts one must
put one's own soul under censorship."

After many bloody battles had been fought we were received again by the
Commander-in-Chief, and this time his cordiality was not marred by any
slighting touch.

"Gentlemen," he said, "you have played the game like men!"

When victory came at last--at last!--after the years of slaughter, it
was the little band of war correspondents on the British front, our
foreign comrades included, whom the Field-Marshal addressed on his first
visit to the Rhine. We stood on the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne,
watched by groups of Germans peering through the escort of Lancers. It
was a dank and foul day, but to us beautiful, because this was the end
of the long journey--four-and--a-half years long, which had been filled
with slaughter all the way, so that we were tired of its backwash
of agony, which had overwhelmed our souls--mine, certainly. The
Commander-in-Chief read out a speech to us, thanking us for our
services, which, he said, had helped him to victory, because we had
heartened the troops and the people by our work. It was a recognition
by the leader of our armies that, as chroniclers of war, we had been a
spiritual force behind his arms. It was a reward for many mournful days,
for much agony of spirit, for hours of danger--some of us had walked
often in the ways of death--and for exhausting labors which we did
so that the world might know what British soldiers had been doing and
suffering.

X

I came to know General Headquarters more closely when it removed, for
fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once within sight of
the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below its hill, but
now looking across a wide vista of richly cultivated fields where many
hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came to G. H. Q. from
journeys over the wild desert of the battlefields, where men lived in
ditches and "pill-boxes," muddy, miserable in all things but spirit, as
to a place where the pageantry