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 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 half-hour,
or ten minutes by ten minutes. Three divisions widely separated provided
all the work one war correspondent could do on one day of action, and
later news on a broader scale, could be obtained from corps headquarters
farther back. Tired, hungry, nerve-racked, splashed to the eyes in mud,
or covered in a mask of dust, we started for the journey back to our own
quarters, which we shifted from time to time in order to get as near as
we could to the latest battle-front without getting beyond reach of the
telegraph instruments--by relays of despatch-riders--at “Signals,” G. H.
Q., which remained immovably fixed in the rear.
There was a rendezvous in one of our rooms, and each man outlined the
historical narrative of the day upon the front he had covered, reserving
for himself his own adventures, impressions, and emotions.
Time slipped away, and time was short, while the despatch-riders
waited for our unwritten despatches, and censors who had been our
fellow-travelers washed themselves cleaner and kept an eye on the clock.
Time was short while the world waited for our tales of tragedy or
victory... and tempers were frayed, and nerves on edge, among five
men who hated one another, sometimes, with a murderous hatred (though,
otherwise, good comrades) and desired one another's death by slow
torture or poison-gas when they fumbled over notes, written in a jolting
car, or on a battlefield walk, and went into past history in order
to explain present happenings, or became tangled in the numbers of
battalions and divisions.
Percival Phillips turned pink-and-white under the hideous strain of
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 ribbon; at
the end of twenty sentences the ribbon was like an angry snake, writhing
and coiling hideously.