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Territorial could not get enough detail upon which his imagination
might build. For all those at home, whose spirits came out to Flanders
seeking to get into touch with young men who were fighting for
honour's sake, it was difficult to form any kind of mental vision, giving
a clear and true picture of this great adventure in "foreign parts."

They would have been surprised at the reality, it was to different from
all their previous imaginings. General Headquarters, for instance, was
a surprise to those who came to such a place for the first time. It was
not, when I went there some months ago, a very long distance from
the fighting lines in these days of long-range guns, but it was a place
of strange quietude in which it was easy to forget the actuality of war--
until one was reminded by sullen far-off rumblings which made the
windows tremble, and made men lift their heads a moment to say:
"They are busy out there to-day." There were no great movements of
troops in the streets. Most of the soldiers one saw were staff officers,
who walked briskly from one building to another with no more than a
word and a smile to any friend they met on the way. Sentries stood
outside the doorways of big houses.

Here and there at the street comers was a military policeman,
scrutinizing any new-comer in civilian clothes with watchful eyes.
Church bells tinkled for early morning Mass or Benediction. Through
an open window looking out upon a broad courtyard the voices of
school children came chanting their A B C in French, as though no
war had taken away their fathers. There was an air of profound peace
here.

At night, when I stood at an open window listening to the silence of
the place it was hard, even though I knew, to think that here in this
town was the Headquarters Staff of the greatest army England has
ever sent abroad, and that the greatest war in history was being
fought out only a few miles away. The raucous horn of a motor-car,
the panting of a motor-cycle, the rumble of a convoy of ambulances,
the shock of a solitary gun, came as the only reminders of the great
horror away there through the darkness. A dispatch rider was coming
back from a night ride on a machine which had side-slipped all the
way from Ypres. An officer was motoring back to a divisional
headquarters after a late interview with the chief... The work went on,
though it was very quiet in General Headquarters.

But the brains of the Army were not asleep. Be