laughter from end to
end. There was nothing plain or blunt about him. He was a man of airy
imagination and a wide range of knowledge, and theories on life and war
which he put forward with dramatic eloquence.

It was of Gen. Hunter Weston that the story was told about the drunken
soldier put onto a stretcher and covered with a blanket, to get him out
of the way when the army commander made a visit to the lines.

"What's this?" said the general.

"Casualty, sir," said the quaking platoon commander.

"Not bad, I hope?"

"Dead, sir," said the subaltern. He meant dead drunk.

The general drew himself up, and said, in his dramatic way, "The army
commander salutes the honored dead!"

And the drunken private put his head from under the blanket and asked,
"What's the old geezer a-sayin' of?"

That story may have been invented in a battalion mess, but it went
through the army affixed to the name of Hunter Weston, and seemed to fit
him.

The 8th Corps was on the left in the first attack on the Somme, when
many of our divisions were cut to pieces in the attempt to break the
German line at Gommecourt. It was a ghastly tragedy, which spoiled the
success on the right at Fricourt and Montauban. But Gen. Hunter Weston
was not degomme, as the French would say, and continued to air his
theories on life and warfare until the day of Victory, when once again
we had "muddled through," not by great generalship, but by the courage
of common men.

Among the divisional generals with whom I came in contact--I met most
of them at one time or another--were General Hull of the 56th (London)
Division, General Hickey of the 16th (Irish) Division, General Harper
of the 51st (Highland) Division, General Nugent of the 36th (Ulster)
Division, and General Pinnie of the 35th (Bantams) Division, afterward
of the 33d.

General Hull was a handsome, straight-speaking, straight-thinking man,
and I should say an able general. "Ruthless," his men said, but this was
a war of ruthlessness, because life was cheap. Bitter he was at times,
because he had to order his men to do things which he knew were folly.
I remember sitting on the window-sill of his bedroom, in an old house of
Arras, while he gave me an account of "the battle in the dark," in which
the Londoners and other English troops lost their direction and found
themselves at dawn with the enemy behind them. General Hull made no
secret of the tragedy or the stupidity... On another day I met him