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 notebooks 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 today. 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.
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 “halftime,” 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 today … 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.
VIII
The Commander-in-Chief—Sir John French—received us when we were first attached to the British armies in the field—a lifetime ago, as it seems to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the château near St.-Omer, which he used as his own headquarters, with his A.D.C.’s in attendance, though the main general headquarters were in the town. Our first colonel gathered us like a shepherd with his flock, counting us twice over before we passed in. A tall, dark young man, whom I knew afterward to be Sir Philip Sassoon, received us and chatted pleasantly in a French salon with folding-doors which shut off an inner room. There were a few portraits of ladies and gentlemen of France in the days before the Revolution, like those belonging to that old aristocracy which still existed, in poverty and pride, in other châteaus in this French Flanders. There was a bouquet of flowers on the table, giving a sweet scent to the room, and sunlight streamed through the shutters … I thought for a moment of the men living in ditches in the salient, under harassing fire by day and night. Their actions and their encounters with death were being arranged, without their knowledge, in this sunny little château. …
The folding-doors opened and Sir John French came in. He wore top-boots and spurs, and after saying, “Good day, gentlemen,” stood with his legs apart, a stocky, soldierly figure, with a square head and heavy jaw. I wondered whether there were any light of genius in him—any inspiration, any force which would break the awful strength of the enemy against us, any cunning in modern warfare.
He coughed a little, and made us a speech. I forget his words, but remember the gist of them. He was pleased to welcome us within his army, and
