hich was to be called, with unconscious irony, "The Army
of Pursuit"--the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a
pursuit--he desired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the
war correspondents were then quartered. As we were paying for it
and liked it, we put up an opposition which was most annoying to his
A.D.C.'s, especially to one young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty
manners, and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who had
looked over our rooms without troubling to knock at the doors, and then
said, "This will suit us down to the ground." On my way back from the
salient one evening I walked up the drive in the flickering light of
summer eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of whom I
thought I recognized as an old friend.

"Hullo!" I said, cheerily. "You here again?"

Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry Rawlinson. He must
have been surprised, but dug me in the ribs in a genial way, and said,
"Hullo, young feller!"

He made no further attempt to "pinch" our quarters, but my familiar
method of address could not have produced that result.

His headquarters at Querrieux were in another old chateau on the
Amiens-Albert road, surrounded by pleasant fields through which a stream
wound its way. Everywhere the sign-boards were red, and a military
policeman, authorized to secure obedience to the rules thereon, slowed
down every motor-car on its way through the village, as though Sir Henry
Rawlinson lay sick of a fever, so anxious were his gestures and his
expression of "Hush! do be careful!"

The army commander seemed to me to have a roguish eye. He seemed to be
thinking to himself, "This war is a rare old joke!" He spoke habitually
of the enemy as "the old Hun" or "old Fritz," in an affectionate,
contemptuous way, as a fellow who was trying his best but getting the
worst of it every time. Before the battles of the Somme I had a talk
with him among his maps, and found that I had been to many places in his
line which he did not seem to know. He could not find there very quickly
on his large-sized maps, or pretended not to, though I concluded that
this was "camouflage," in case I might tell "old Fritz" that such
places existed. Like most of our generals, he had amazing, overweening
optimism. He had always got the enemy "nearly beat," and he arranged
attacks during the Somme fighting with the jovial sense of striking
another blow which would lead this time