aste of army mind, they believed that war was the special
prerogative of professional soldiers, of which politicians and people
should have no knowledge. Therefore as civilians in khaki we were hardly
better than spies.

The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in the moonlight,
after a day up the line, where young men were living and dying in dirty
ditches. I could see that he was worried, even angry.

"Those people!" he said.

"What people?"

"G. H. Q."

"Oh, Lord!" I groaned. "Again?" and looked across the fields of corn
to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were
learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn
came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that
day--or yesterday was it?--kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with
his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer... How sweet was
the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star twinkled above the
low flashes of gun-fire away there in the salient.

"They want us to waste your time," said the officer. "Those were the
very words used by the Chief of Intelligence--in writing which I have
kept. 'Waste their time!'... I'll be damned if I consider my work is to
waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good fools see that
this is not a professional adventure, like their other little wars; that
the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to know what its
men are doing? They have a right to know."

IV

Just at first--though not for long--there was a touch of hostility
against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but
not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their
quarters, wondered why we should come "spying around," trying to "see
things." I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early
times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a
brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy
nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy clouds
in a blue sky. There was a long straight road leading to the village of
Vermelles, with a crisscross of communication trenches on one side,
and, on the other, fields where corn and grass grew rankly in abandoned
fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though this were Arcady
in days of peace. It was not. The red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or
so away, were sharply defined, as through