be
softened by the thought of their courage. We will not stand for this
anonymous war; and you are 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 to