men, the Peter Pan who went a
bird-nesting on battlefields, a lover of beauty and games and old poems
and Greek and Latin tags, and all joy in life--what had he to do with
war?--looked bored with an infinite boredom, irritable with a scornful
impatience of unnecessary detail, gazed through his gold-rimmed
spectacles with an air of extreme detachment (when Percy Robinson
rebuilt the map with dabs and dashes on a blank sheet of paper), and
said, "I've got more than I can write, and The Daily Mail goes early to
press."

"Thanks very much... It's very kind of you."

We gathered up our note-books and were punctiliously polite. (Afterward
we were the best of friends.) Thomas was first out of the room, with
short, quick little steps in spite of his long legs. His door banged.
Phillips was first at his typewriter, working it like a machine-gun, in
short, furious spasms of word-fire. I sat down to my typewriter--a
new instrument of torture to me--and coaxed its evil genius with
conciliatory prayers.

"For dear God's sake," I said, "don't go twisting that blasted ribbon of
yours to-day. I must write this despatch, and I've just an hour when I
want five."

Sometimes that Corona was a mechanism of singular sweetness, and I
blessed it with a benediction. But often there was a devil in it which
mocked at me. After the first sentence or two it twisted the ribbon; at
the end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry snake, writhing
and coiling hideously.

I shouted for Mackenzie, the American, a master of these things.

He came in and saw my blanched face, my sweat of anguish, my crise de
nerfs. I could see by his eyes that he understood my stress and had pity
on me.

"That's all right," he said. "A little patience--"

By a touch or two he exorcised the devil, laughed, and said: "Go easy.
You've just about reached breaking--point."

I wrote, as we all wrote, fast and furiously, to get down something of
enormous history, word-pictures of things seen, heroic anecdotes, the
underlying meaning of this new slaughter. There was never time to think
out a sentence or a phrase, to touch up a clumsy paragraph, to go back
on a false start, to annihilate a vulgar adjective, to put a touch
of style into one's narrative. One wrote instinctively, blindly,
feverishly... And downstairs were the censors, sending up messages by
orderlies to say "half-time," or "ten minutes more," and cutting
out sometimes the things one wanted most to