It was not long before we broke down the prejudice against us among
the fighting units. The new armies were our friends from the first,
and liked us to visit them in their trenches and their dugouts, their
camps and their billets. Every young officer was keen to show us his
particular "peep-show" or to tell us his latest "stunt." We made many
friends among them, and it was our grief that as the war went on so
many of them disappeared from their battalions, and old faces were
replaced by new faces, and those again by others when they had become
familiar. Again and again, after battle, twenty-two officers in a
battalion mess were reduced to two or three, and the gaps were filled
up from the reserve depots. I was afraid to ask, "Where is So-and-so?"
because I knew that the best answer would be, "A Blighty wound," and
the worst was more likely.

It was the duration of all the drama of death that seared one's soul
as an onlooker; the frightful sum of sacrifice that we were recording
day by day. There were times when it became intolerable and agonizing,
and when I at least desired peace-at-almost-any-price, peace by
negotiation, by compromise, that the river of blood might cease to
flow. The men looked so splendid as they marched up to the lines,
singing, whistling, with an easy swing. They looked so different when
thousands came down again, to field dressing-stations--the walking
wounded and the stretcher cases, the blind and the gassed--as we saw
them on the mornings of battle, month after month, year after year.

Our work as chroniclers of their acts was not altogether "soft,"
though we did not go "over the top" or live in the dirty ditches with
them. We had to travel prodigiously to cover the ground between one
division and another along a hundred miles of front, with long walks
often at the journey's end and a wet way back. Sometimes we were