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 rouse
myself to a new day's effort. There were times when I was faint and sick
and weak; and my colleagues were like me. But we struggled on to tell
the daily history of the war and the public cursed us because we did not
tell more, or sneered at us because they thought we were “spoon-fed” by
G. H. Q.--who never gave us any news and who were far from our way of
life, except when they thwarted us, by petty restrictions and foolish
rules.