He was an old cavalry officer, and this major of the old, old
school (belonging in spirit to the time of Charles Lever) was excited
by the thought that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one of
those who swore that if he had his chance he would "ride into the blue."
It was the chance he wanted and he nursed his way to it by delicate
attentions to General Haldane. The general's bed was not so comfortable
as his. He changed places. He even went so far as to put a bunch of
flowers on the general's table in his dugout.

"You seem very attentive to me, major," said the general, smelling a
rat.

Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead a squadron round
Delville Wood? Could he take that ride into the blue? He would give his
soul to do it.

"Get on with your job," said General Haldane.

That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry to the belief
that they would be of real value in a warfare of trench lines and barbed
wire, but for a long time later they were kept moving backward and
forward between the edge of the battlefields and the back areas, to the
great incumbrance of the roads, until they were "guyed" by the infantry,
and irritable, so their officers told me, to the verge of mutiny. Their
irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in the trenches,
and I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston Steps,
this side of Thiepval, and cursing their spade-work.

In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that, fighting in
the summer and autumn of 1916, which I have written with many details
of each day's scene in my collected despatches called The Battles of
the Somme. There is little that I can add to those word-pictures which
I wrote day by day, after haunting experiences amid the ruin of those
fields, except a summing-up of their effect upon the mentality of our
men, and upon the Germans who were in the same "blood-bath," as they
called it, and a closer analysis of the direction and mechanism of our
military machine.

Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowledge gained in
the years that followed, it seems clear that our High Command was too
prodigal in its expenditure of life in small sectional battles, and that
the army corps and divisional staffs had not established an efficient
system of communication with the fighting units under their control. It
seemed to an outsider like myself that a number of separate battles were
being fought withou