soaked to the skin on the journey home. Often we were so cold and
numbed in those long wild drives up desolate roads that our limbs lost
consciousness and the wind cut into us like knives. We were working
against time, always against time, and another tire-burst would mean
that no despatch could be written of a great battle on the British
front, or only a short record written in the wildest haste when there
was so much to tell, so much to describe, such unforgetable pictures
in one's brain of another day's impressions in the fields and on the
roads.

There were five English correspondents and, two years later, two
Americans. On mornings of big battle we divided up the line of front
and drew lots for the particular section which each man would cover.
Then before the dawn, or in the murk of winter mornings, or the first
glimmer of a summer day, our cars would pull out and we would go off
separately to the part of the line allotted to us by the number drawn,
to see the preliminary bombardment, to walk over newly captured
ground, to get into the backwash of prisoners and walking wounded,
amid batteries firing a new barrage, guns moving forward on days of
good advance, artillery transport bringing up new stores of
ammunition, troops in support marching to repel a counter-attack or
follow through the new objectives, ambulances threading their way back
through the traffic, with loads of prostrate men, mules, gunhorses,
lorries churning up the mud in Flanders.

So we gained a personal view of all this activity of strife, and from
many men in its whirlpool details of their own adventure and of
general progress or disaster on one sector of the battle-front. Then
in divisional headquarters we saw the reports of the battle as they
came in by telephone, or aircraft, or pigeon-post, from half-hour to