upheaved earth among ruins and slaughtered trees. War at Montreuil was
quite a pleasant occupation for elderly generals who liked their
little stroll after lunch, and for young Regular officers, released
from the painful necessity of dying for their country, who were glad
to get a game of tennis, down below the walls there, after strenuous
office-work in which they had written "Passed to you" on many
"minutes," or had drawn the most comical caricatures of their
immediate chief, and of his immediate chief, on blotting-pads and
writing-blocks.

It seemed, at a mere glance, that all these military inhabitants of G.
H. Q. were great and glorious soldiers. Some of the youngest of them
had a row of decorations from Montenegro, Serbia, Italy, Rumania, and
other states, as recognition of gallant service in translating German
letters (found in dugouts by the fighting-men), or arranging for
visits of political personages to the back areas of war, or initialing
requisitions for pink, blue, green, and yellow forms, which in due
course would find their way to battalion adjutants for immediate
filling-up in the middle of an action. The oldest of them, those
white-haired, bronze-faced, gray-eyed generals in the administrative
side of war, had started their third row of ribbons well before the
end of the Somme battles, and had flower-borders on their breasts by
the time the massacres had been accomplished in the fields of
Flanders. I know an officer who was awarded the D. S. 0. because he
had hindered the work of war correspondents with the zeal of a hedge-
sparrow in search of worms, and another who was the best-decorated man
in the army because he had presided over a visitors' chateau and
entertained Royalties, Members of Parliament, Mrs. Humphry Ward,
miners, Japanese, Russian revolutionaries, Portuguese ministers, Harry
Lauder, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, clergymen, Montenegrins, and the