nervous control, with an hour and a half for two columns in The
Morning Post. A little pulse throbbed in his forehead. His lips were
tightly pressed. His oaths and his anguish were in his soul, but
unuttered. Beach Thomas, the most amiable of men, the Peter Pan who
went a bird-nesting on battlefields, a lover of beauty and games and
old poems and Greek and Latin tags, and all joy in life--what had he
to do with war?--looked bored with an infinite boredom, irritable with
a scornful impatience of unnecessary detail, gazed through his gold-
rimmed spectacles with an air of extreme detachment (when Percy
Robinson rebuilt the map with dabs and dashes on a blank sheet of
paper), and said, "I've got more than I can write, and The Daily Mail
goes early to press."

"Thanks very much. . . It's very kind of you."

We gathered up our note-books and were punctiliously polite.
(Afterward we were the best of friends.) Thomas was first out of the
room, with short, quick little steps in spite of his long legs. His
door banged. Phillips was first at his typewriter, working it like a
machine-gun, in short, furious spasms of word-fire. I sat down to my
typewriter--a new instrument of torture to me--and coaxed its evil
genius with conciliatory prayers.

"For dear God's sake," I said, "don't go twisting that blasted ribbon
of yours to-day. I must write this despatch, and I've just an hour
when I want five."

Sometimes that Corona was a mechanism of singular sweetness, and I
blessed it with a benediction. But often there was a devil in it
which mocked at me. After the first sentence or two it twisted the