ribbon; at the end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry
snake, writhing and coiling hideously.

I shouted for Mackenzie, the American, a master of these things.

He came in and saw my blanched face, my sweat of anguish, my crise
de nerfs. I could see by his eyes that he understood my stress and
had pity on me.

"That's all right," he said. "A little patience--"

By a touch or two he exorcised the devil, laughed, and said: "Go easy.
You've just about reached breaking--point."

I wrote, as we all wrote, fast and furiously, to get down something
of enormous history, word-pictures of things seen, heroic anecdotes,
the underlying meaning of this new slaughter. There was never time
to think out a sentence or a phrase, to touch up a clumsy paragraph,
to go back on a false start, to annihilate a vulgar adjective, to
put a touch of style into one's narrative. One wrote instinctively,
blindly, feverishly. . . And downstairs were the censors, sending up
messages by orderlies to say "half-time," or "ten minutes more," and
cutting out sometimes the things one wanted most to say, modifying a
direct statement of fact into a vague surmise, taking away the honor
due to the heroic men who had fought and died to-day. . . Who would
be a war correspondent, or a censor?

So it happened day by day, for five months at a stretch, when big
battles were in progress. It was not an easy life. There were times
when I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I could hardly