it. How well I
remember my Chief of the General Staff coming up to me at a big
conference on Salisbury Plain where I had spent five very useful minutes
explaining the inwardness of things to old Bennett Burleigh, the War
Correspondent. He (the C.G.S.) begged me to see Burleigh privately,
afterwards, as it would "create a bad impression" were I seen by
everyone to be on friendly terms with the old man! He meant it very
kindly: from his point of view he was quite right. I lay no claim to be
more candid than the rest of them: quite the contrary. Only, over that
particular line of country, I am more candid. Whenever anyone
ostentatiously washes his hands of the Press in my hearing I chuckle
over the memory of the administrator who was admonishing me as to the
unsuitability of a public servant having a journalistic acquaintance
when, suddenly, the door opened; the parlour-maid entered and said,
"Lord Northcliffe is on the 'phone."

Have told Lord K. in my letter we have just enough shell for one more
attack. After that, we fold our hands and wait the arrival of the new
troops and the new outfit of ammunition:--not "wait and see" but "wait
and suffer." A month is a desperate long halt to have in a battle. A
month, at least, to let weariness and sickness spread whilst new armies
of enemies replace those whose hearts we have broken,--at a cost of how
many broken hearts, I wonder, in Australasia and England?

This enforced pause in our operations is a desperate bad business: for
to-day there is a feeling in the air--thrilling through the ranks--that
_at last_ the upper hand is ours. Now is the moment to fall on with
might and main,--to press unrelentingly and without break or pause until
we wrest victory from Fortune. Morally, we are confident
but,--materially? Alas, to-morrow, for our last "dart" before
reinforcements arrive a month hence, my shell only runs to a forty
minutes' bombardment of some half a mile of the enemy's trenches. We
simply have not shell wherewith to cover more or keep it up any longer.

A General laying down the law to a Field Marshal is as obnoxious to
military "form" as a vacuum was once supposed to be to the sentiments of
nature. The child, who teaches its grandmother to suck eggs, commits a
venial fault in comparison. So I have had to convey my precepts
insensibly to Milord K.--to convey them in homeopathic doses of parable.
The brilliant French success of the 21st-22nd, I explain to him, was due
to