Now It Can Be Told | Page 7

wasting time by keeping it secret,
because the imagination of those who have not joined cannot be fired
by cold lines which say, 'There is nothing to report on the western
front.'"
In March of 1915 I went out with the first body of accredited war
correspondents, and we saw some of the bad places where our men
lived and died, and the traffic to the lines, and the mechanism of war in
fixed positions as were then established after the battle of the Marne
and the first battle of Ypres. Even then it was only an experimental visit.
It was not until June of that year, after an adventure on the French front
in the Champagne, that I received full credentials as a war
correspondent with the British armies on the western front, and joined
four other men who had been selected for this service, and began that
long innings as an authorized onlooker of war which ended, after long
and dreadful years, with the Army of Occupation beyond the Rhine.

III
In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by courtesy
a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General Headquarters at
St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time to time,
according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was very
peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women
worked while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied us
by the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick ride
over Cassel Hill to the edge of the Ypres salient and the farthest point
where any car could go without being seen by a watchful enemy and
blown to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we walked, up sinister roads,
or along communication trenches, to the fire-step in the front line, or
into places like "Plug Street" wood and Kemmel village, and the ruins

of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle-- the training-schools of
British armies--where always birds of death were on the wing,
screaming with high and rising notes before coming to earth with the
cough that killed. . . After hours in those hiding- places where boys of
the New Army were learning the lessons of war in dugouts and ditches
under the range of German guns, back again to the little white chateau
at Tatinghem, with a sweet scent of flowers from the fields, and
nightingales singing in the woods and a bell tinkling for Benediction in
the old church tower beyond our gate.
"To-morrow," said the colonel--our first chief--before driving in for a
late visit to G. H. Q., "we will go to Armentieres and see how the
'Kitchener' boys are shaping in the line up there. It ought to be
interesting."
The colonel was profoundly interested in the technic of war, in its
organization of supplies and transport, and methods of command. He
was a Regular of the Indian Army, a soldier by blood and caste and
training, and the noblest type of the old school of Imperial officer, with
obedience to command as a religious instinct; of stainless honor, I think,
in small things as well as great, with a deep love of England, and a
belief and pride in her Imperial destiny to govern many peoples for
their own good, and with the narrowness of such belief. His
imagination was limited to the boundaries of his professional interests,
though now and then his humanity made him realize in a perplexed
way greater issues at stake in this war than the challenge to British
Empiry.
One day, when we were walking through the desolation of a battlefield,
with the smell of human corruption about us, and men crouched in
chalky ditches below their breastworks of sand-bags, he turned to a
colleague of mine and said in a startled way:
"This must never happen again! Never!"
It will never happen again for him, as for many others. He was too tall
for the trenches, and one day a German sniper saw the red glint of his
hat-band--he was on the staff of the 11th Corps--and thought, "a gay

bird"! So he fell; and in our mess, when the news came, we were sad at
his going, and one of our orderlies, who had been his body- servant,
wept as he waited on us.
Late at night the colonel--that first chief of ours--used to come home
from G. H. Q., as all men called General Headquarters with a sense of
mystery, power, and inexplicable industry accomplishing--what?--in
those initials. He came back with a cheery shout of, "Fine weather to-
morrow!" or, "A starry night and all's well!" looking fine and soldierly
as the glare of his headlights shone on his tall figure with red tabs and a
colored