with a separate agony, making a dark background to this too real
dream from which there was no awakening.

I was always travelling during those eight or nine weeks of history--for
the most time I had two companions with me--dear fellows whose
comradeship was a fine personal pleasure, in spite of all the pain into
which we plunged. Together we journeyed continually and
prodigiously, covering thousands of miles during those weeks, in all
sorts of directions, by all sorts of ways, in troop trains and cattle
trucks, in motor-cars and taxi-cabs, and on Shanks's nag. There were
no couriers in those days between France and England, and to get
our dispatches home we often had to take them across the Channel,
using most desperate endeavours to reach a port of France in time
for the next boat home and staying in Fleet Street only a few hours
before hurrying back to Dover or Folkestone in order to plunge again
into the fever of invaded France. Later Paris was our goal, and we
would struggle back to it along lines choked with munitions of war or
completely held for the transport of great masses of troops, arriving,
at night as a rule, weary for lack of sleep, dirty from the filth of cattle
trucks crowded with unwashed men and women, hungry after
meagre rations of biscuits and cheese, mentally and physically
exhausted, so that one such night I had to be carried upstairs to my
room, so weak that I could not drag one leg after the other nor lift a
hand from the coverlet. On another day one of my companions--the
Strategist--sat back, rather quiet, in a taxi-cab which panted in a
wheezy way along the interminably straight roads of France, through
villages from which all their people had fled under the shadow of a
great fear which followed them, until when the worn-out vehicle could
go no further, but halted helplessly on a lonely highway remote as it
seemed from any habitation, my friend confessed that he was weak
even as a new-born babe and could not walk a hundred yards to
save his life. Yet he is a strong man who had never been in a doctor's
hands since childhood.

His weakness, the twist of pain about his mouth, the weariness in his
eyes, scared us then. The Philosopher, who had not yet begun to feel
in his bones the heat of the old tropical fever which afterwards made
him toss at nights and call out strange words, shook his head and
spoke with the enormous gravity which gives an air of prophecy and
awful wisdom to a man whose se