'My Seven Selves'

by Hamilton Fyfe

 

The War-Time Experiences of a British Journalist

Hamilton Fyfe (foreground right) in France during the Great War

 

As a rule, if a man gets into the forties without wanting to set things straight, he is secure against the microbe that bites reformers. Now I found this rule did not apply to me. How I should have developed if the war had not come I cannot tell. The war did come, and brought the reformer in me more and more to the top.

From the very early days of it I had forced upon me the misery caused by the blunders of governing men. Not until six years later did Mr. Lloyd George blurt out the truth — that the rulers of nations "stumbled and staggered into war." It was plain enough to anyone behind the scenes within a few months of the start. No one had believed in war coming, therefore no one had made full preparations for it. In the last week, desperate efforts were made to ward it off, but the feeble incapacity of politicians, their shrinking from decisions, could not be overcome. If Asquith had done as Poincaré urged, and Sazonoff, Russian Foreign Minister urged, if he had declared that "Britain would go to the aid of France in the event of a conflict between France and Germany as a result of the present differences between Austria and Serbia" (Bertie, British Ambassador in Paris, to Grey, July 28, 1914), the politicians in Germany, who were at any rate less stupid than the naval and military chiefs, would have been able to hold these fire-eaters in check. But Asquith could say only that he "had not made up his mind what to do" (Grey to Bertie, July 29th). His confession, the most humiliating that statesman could utter, was all the more inept for the reason that Asquith knew Britain would have to stand by France and Russia, whether he announced it or not. Grey had committed his country so completely to this course — with the consent of the Inner Cabinet, but without the knowledge of Ministers outside that body — that it was meaningless to tell Poincaré "we should have to decide" what to do. The course had been decided long before. Yet Asquith was too timid, too constitutionally incapable of cutting a knot instead of hoping it would come untied of its own accord, to make the declaration for which Poincaré and Sazonoff begged. The only possible explanation is that he hoped the war-cloud might disperse without his assistance.

Inexcusable as this was in a Prime Minister, there certainly prevailed a general belief that the peril would blow over. As I was at the moment without any inside information, I shared it. So much so that when I was sent to the French eastern frontier in the middle of the week I took my wife with me. I thought she might as well share what promised to be a pleasant excursion.

Northcliffe, at a conference on the Wednesday, asked me where I wanted to go. I said Serbia. He shook his head. "Impossible to get there." I did not believe this, but I did not argue the point.

"What about the French frontier then?" "Good. Can you catch the two o'clock train?" It was then nearly noon. I said yes without any intention of catching it, and went off to our cottage. Bedelia was in London for the day. She was to meet me for dinner; we were going to the theatre. I packed a suit-case, got a maid to pack one for her, went back, met her at the appointed time.

"We aren't going to the theatre," I told her. "We're going to France."

"Are we?" said Bedelia. "Then I must buy a hat."

So we bought a hat and took it with us in a paper bag.

We travelled as far as Calais with two other newspaper men bound for Vienna. They did not believe in war — not in a general war — it was "unthinkable." The Austro-Serbian squabble would be localized. We should have a nice trip along the frontier through the Vosges (I had ordered a car to meet us at Chalons). We should be back in London within a week. So my friends predicted. And in Amiens the next morning war seemed still more unthinkable. The city was its usual smiling, prosperous, comfortable self. No sign of anything out of the way except a knot of people reading some news posted up in the window of a bank. If anyone had prophesied that in a month's time I should be in Amiens again, listening to German guns; that later I should be fleeing from its streets into cellars to escape from aeroplane bombs; that I was to see Amiens evacuated, silent, empty, I should have been scornful, perhaps rude.

The slow train that took us to Chalons passed many stations with names then unknown to us, names that would be known in a little while to all the world. In Villers-Bretonneau and Rosieres I was, within a month, picking up wounded men from fields of battle. Through Ham and Laon, dreaming in the sunshine that day, the retreating Allied armies were to pour in disorder with the enemy on their heels. Already, as we came nearer to the frontier, there quivered a vague fear of these things, from which the rest of the land was still immune. At Chalons I asked that English sovereigns might be changed into francs. The bank refused. I argued with the manager. I told him that nowhere in the world had I ever met with such a refusal. He said: "Never in the world, Monsieur, have we known such days as these." The hotel-keeper changed my gold, and laughed at the idea of war. But the Fates were even then spinning with scarlet thread. Already on that hot perfect summer day the shadow of the sword lay across the ripe cornfields, the whispering forests, of the Ardennes.

We drove through the frontier towns, saw something of that "Chinese wall" of fortresses which it was hard to believe the Germans would be crazy enough to attack. Clemenceau told King Edward in 1908 that the German armies would invade France through Belgium. The Chief of the French General Staff told Lord Roberts the same in 1910. Joffre did not share this view. When he was asked, "But suppose they did?" he would reply: "Ah, s'ils font cela, je les tiens." ("If they do that, I shall have them.") What he meant nobody knew. He made light of the danger in Belgium even when General Lanrezac warned him of it just before the war. We did not know it, when we passed through Verdun, Epinal, Luneville, and so came to Nancy, but the French were about to mobilize in the wrong place.

This had a disastrous effect on the early part of the war. The German advance through Belgium was opposed only by the small British force and a few weak French divisions. The Germans, easily driving this opposition before them, gained an immense advantage. France had them on her soil for the next four years. They might never have got there if the French had mobilized in the right place.

Our Friday evening at Nancy was normal. The hotel was full, the dining-room buzzed with cheerful talk. I saw old Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald and had a chat with him. He belonged to the "unthinkable" school. Everyone hoped the crisis would be over within twenty-four hours. It was over, within less than twenty-four hours, but not as they had hoped. Next day we read on the walls the proclamation of war between Germany and France, and that night the hotel was dark and silent. No dinner was served; cooks and waiters had all gone to join their regiments: no guests save Bedelia and I were left. We shared a gloomy meal with the proprietor and his wife. At six o'clock on the Sunday morning we started for Paris.

At the entrance to the first village on the road there was a barrier and a soldier. We were asked for our papers. Of course we had none. In those agreeable days passports were needed only for barbarous countries like Tsarist Russia and Turkey under Abdul the Damned. However, there the soldier stood, a middle-aged man in a uniform that did not fit, but with a sense of duty which nothing could shake. I foresaw, too, that at every town and village on the road we should have to produce something or be detained. I remembered my escape in Mexico. Unfortunately I had torn up the invitation card which served me well in Monterrey. But in my letter-case I had a season-ticket for the Earl's Court Exhibition in London. (An open-air show of which that summer saw the last.) It was like a railway "season," printed and stamped, and with a signature on it, which I believe was that of Lady Warwick, who was financing the Exhibition that summer. This I produced and handed over with a bow and a polite, "Pardon, Monsieur." The soldier bowed as he took it and said, "Merci, Monsieur." He looked at it upside down, turned it this way and that, glanced at the driver, who had the wit to say importantly, "Service de la Presse," then it was returned to me with another bow and we were free to go on. I suppose I showed that ticket thirty times before we got to Paris. Everywhere it worked like a charm.

The whole country swarmed already with soldiers. Most of them were middle-aged, none of their uniforms fitted. They wore the absurd red trousers below the blue coat which had been in fashion since Napoleon's time. I recall a conversation with a French journalist who assured me that the army would lose all spirit if its red trousers were taken away. He would not listen to me when I said the uniform would have to be altered, as the British red coats were changed to khaki in South Africa. That was the general attitude of Frenchmen. That accounted for their troops being sent to Lorraine and Alsace instead of to the north. They were satisfied with everything as it was.

Paris itself was strangely unwarlike after our experiences. The sacred rite of Sunday dejeuner was being celebrated when we arrived. War seemed to have made no difference yet. But later in the day there were processions singing the Marseillaise, and at night the ruffians who had paraded in the guise of patriots looted any number of shops, and in a day or two not more than two people were allowed to talk together in public, and when we began to play the piano one evening in a flat where I was staying with a friend, many windows in the courtyard were opened and angry voices protested. The war by that time had got on the nerves of the Parisians badly.

To me at first it was an exciting novelty. The thrill of romance was in it still. All that I had read about war (nearly all of it rubbish) flooded my mind with ideas of pomp and circumstance, of shrewd intellects contending for advantage, of marching columns and flying cavalry doing as those intellects planned. What a fool I was! How quickly I learned that war is above all dullness; that those who direct it — or let it take its own course — are mostly pompous, incompetent dullards; that, like all other machinery, the machinery of war has escaped from the control of its users; that the task of soldiers is to cower in trench dug-outs and have hell rained upon them. However, for the moment, before I had seen anything of it, war appeared to be a tremendous event, full of colour, fine in quality; and I was going to report it.

I sent Bedelia home to England after a day or two and joined Alphonse Courlander in his apartment at the back of the Rue de Rivoli. His family were away. He was glad to have company. A third journalist, Rosetti, a Roumanian, also stayed there, and as long as we were together Alphonse was cheerful and confident. He talked about going to the front if his paper would send him and if he could ride "a little low horse." A delightful fellow he was, amusing, quick-witted, but not well-equipped to withstand the panic which seized the city as the Germans came nearer every day. I was driving back from Rouen one day just after it started and met on the road hundreds of vehicles of all descriptions making for the coast, piled with luggage and furniture and bedding and bird-cages, the owners' white faces peering out anxiously at the imprudent fellow who was going towards the danger. The alarm was intensified by the folly of the authorities. They had issued so many lying statements that no one believed anything — except that the danger was a great deal nearer than official announcements admitted. This untrustworthy character of the communiqué's got me into an adventure that might have ended in catastrophe. But let me finish the melancholy tale of Alphonse Courlander first.

He was left alone in his flat. Rosetti had gone off somewhere. I was spending my time between the front and the coast, whither I had to take my despatches to be put on board steamers for England. Alphonse caught the prevailing epidemic of fright. One morning he made up his mind to leave for London. Then, as he sat in the train, the shame of abandoning his post came vividly before him and he jumped out. But the next morning he went to the station again and this time he stayed in the train. In London he was badly received. He killed himself. I am certain that if Rosetti and I had been with him he would have laughed at the panic and might be alive to-day. It was because nothing of the sort had ever before come into his safe, sheltered life that he imagined the horrors of a siege and bombardment to be much worse than they are.

My own adventure was this. One evening Arthur Moore of the London Times and I were in search of a lodging for the night. It was not easy work being a war correspondent just then. Neither the French nor the British armies would recognize us. I had seen the War Minister in Paris and been assured by him that if any newspaper men were attached to the French troops I should be one of them. But, he added, there was no likelihood of this. As soon as we knew that the British Expeditionary Force had reached the position allotted to it, Ward Price and I made for Le Cateau, where General Headquarters had been established. The dirty little town on the Belgian border was full of "red tabs" (this nickname for staff officers was altered to "brass hats"). We went into an hotel to get a meal. Almost the first person I saw there was an officer named Wyndham Childs whom I had known earlier in the year in Ireland. He was then attached to General Macready and had taken it ill that I should dare to criticize his chief. Now he could get some of his own back. He sneaked off and reported to Colonel MacDonogh, the Provost-marshal, that he had seen me. Before we had finished our dinner an orderly came in and asked us our names. When we gave them, he said the Provost-marshal wished to see us outside.

Our interview with Colonel MacDonogh (now Sir George and "something in the City") was short. He said, "You know you've no business here." We replied that we had important business. We wanted to be attached to the Force as correspondents. He said, "You ought to have known you would not be allowed in Le Cateau." We asked how we could have known that. He did not tell us, but he said, "You're under arrest. I could put you in the town gaol if I chose." We said that would suit us, as the town was full and we had nowhere to sleep. He said grimly, "Have you seen the place?" then he offered to let us go if we gave our word that we would report to him at nine o'clock next morning. We did that, and found a barn where a number of French soldiers were sleeping. They made us welcome; we slept soundly on the hay. In the morning we were forced to sign a promise that we would keep out of "the zone of the British armies." Then we drove disconsolately back We kept our word, of course, but we managed to see and report a good many things of interest. For instance, a couple of days after Lord Kitchener had announced in Parliament that no British correspondents were left in France (there had been hundreds during the first few days) I had a page in the Mail describing the arrival of the earliest train of British wounded at Rouen and recounting the earliest stories of the Battle of Mons. That annoyed Lord Kitchener: he told an acquaintance of mine, Captain Bede Bentley. that if I were caught he would have me shot. I knew that was nonsense, but when the Germans announced that any newspaper men captured would be treated as spies I felt that they meant it. Still, that did not worry me. Moore and I went on getting as near as we could and sending all the news that we could pick up (it was given to pursers steamers and met by special messengers on the other side).

We had avoided Amiens, which was "in the zone." We knew nothing about the result of the battle until one morning about seven o'clock, driving back from Boulogne where we had heard of a steamer, we saw a British army lorry by the roadside and a soldier in it, shaving. We pulled up. "Hullo, what are you doing here?" we inquired. "Come from Amiens," he said. "All the rest went on. We got something wrong with our engine. Rare old turn-out it was all of a sudden."

By this time other soldiers had appeared and we heard the whole story. Orders had been given for a hasty retreat of all the British troops in and about Amiens. What had happened? They shrugged their shoulders. Where were they going? They didn't know. What Moore and I felt instantly was that we had to know. There was nothing to keep us out of Amiens now. In less than two hours we were there, listening to the sound of not very distant guns. We drove about all that day seeking for news and realizing every hour more and more clearly the disaster that had happened. We saw no organized bodies of troops, but we met and talked to many fugitives in twos and threes, who had lost their units in disorderly retreat and for the most part had no idea where they were.

One oldish man, an R.A.M.C. colonel, brought out his map to show us the way he had come. It was one of those maps in sections that expose the section required under a sheet of talc for protection against wet. He was peering into the section he had exposed when we said, "But you're off that altogether." When he understood how far the retreat had gone, he could not speak, tears came into his eyes.

The private soldiers we met had thrown away their equipment. They did not seem depressed or anxious, only puzzled. For weeks after this I came across oddments making their way slowly towards the coast. Some had been hidden in farm-houses. Some had lain up in forests, trusting themselves on the roads only at night. Most of them in their narratives dwelt mostly on the humorous side of their wanderings. No other nation on earth produces men like that.

That Friday night, tired as we were, Moore and I sat down and wrote what we had seen. Then we set off to Dieppe to put our messages on a boat which we knew would be leaving on the Saturday morning. They reached London on Saturday night. Both were published in The Times next day. {The Times was then published on Sunday; the Mail was not.) As they gave the first news of the defeat they must in any case have caused a sensation. But the sensation would not have been so painful if Lord Birkenhead, then F. E. Smith, had not been Press Censor at the time. The despatches were taken to him after dinner. When the man who took them told me about it later on, he said, "After dinner — you know what that meant with him. Birkenhead saw that they must be published. He saw the intention with which they had been written — to rouse the nation to a sense of the need for greater effort. But he seemed to think that it would be better to suggest disaster by the free use of dots than to let the account appear in coherent and consecutive form. With unsteady hand he struck out sentences and parts of sentences, substituting dots for them, and thus making it appear that the truth was far worse than the public could be allowed to know.

While my message alarmed some, it angered others — naturally enough considering how it read after being sub-edited by Smith. I was accused of exaggeration, hysteria. In the House of Commons, Asquith, not troubling to ascertain how the affair had been handled by his Press Censor, attacked me. Often it has been suggested that I took far too gloomy a view of what had happened at Mons and after the defeat. Never have I cared to defend myself or to make public Birkenhead's share in the matter. Now I think I have a right to explain, and also to quote one or two statements about the retreat from officers of high rank — who were on the spot — authorities who will not be suspected of magnifying the calamity.

Sir Henry Wilson's order to General Snow of the IVth Division on August 27th was to "throw overboard all ammunition and impedimenta not absolutely required." In his diary three days later Wilson wrote: "If we get ten days of quiet, we shall be able to get out of the really great confusion we are now in. We have men of every battalion and battery scattered all over the place; columns of ammunition, sappers, ambulances, parks, etc., mixed up in the most bewildering way."

Major-General Sir George MacDonogh is quoted in Lord Riddell's diary as having said at the time that "our Army was completely disorganized, and that Lord French was determined to retreat thirty or forty miles beyond Paris to refit. Indeed, there was some idea of taking the Army back to England for the purpose."

Brigadier-General Charteris, who was with the Headquarters staff, wrote of "the long- drawn horror of the retreat," and described it as "running for our lives." Brigadier-General Spears recorded on the 28th that General French's thoughts were "all with his badly- mauled troops." Some of these troops belonging to the IInd Corps he met. They were "bedraggled, unkempt, hardly recognizable as soldiers." After the engagement at Le Cateau "regiments rolled back too weary to be allowed to halt, for any man who lay down dropped off to sleep on the road, and could not be roused even to drag himself out of the way of vehicles or from under the hoofs of horses."

Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson spoke of the British troops being "bruised, battered, sometimes beaten to their knees." General French told Lord Kitchener on August 31st the "shattered condition" of the Ilnd Corps. Even at the Battle of Marne the men of this unit "showed by their faces and tattered clothing the ordeal they had been through. Hardly any of them had greatcoats, many had lost their caps and puttees, and wore the most disreputable headgear, some evidently borrowed from scarecrows" (Spears).

According to Colonel Repington's diary, Birkenhead admitted to him in 1918 that "when the trouble arose about The Times alarmist telegram" he and the Editor "had both made mistakes." He added that he had "cut" the Editor ever since. It was, I believe, the other way about. Neither he nor Asquith expressed regret at any time for the injustice done to me. How little "alarmist" my dispatch was — in the sense of heightening the confusion of the retreat — the passages I have quoted show.

It was a couple of days after this that Moore and I were looking for somewhere to sleep. We hoped to find beds in Beauvais, but we were too late. The roads into the town were barricaded for the night. At first an officer to whom we appealed was inclined to let us through, if we carried our bags and left our car outside. But a number of peasants also shut out said that if we were admitted they must be. So the officer testily said, "Then you can none of you come in." We could have slept in the car, but we were hungry, so we went back along the road we had come by to an inn we had noticed.

We found it filled with refugees. One met these unhappy creatures wherever one went. Those who still think "there is something to be said for war" need reminding of this aspect of it. No sufferings are worse than those of people forced suddenly to leave their homes, to pile a few of their belongings on to hand-carts or perambulators, to tramp endless weary miles with their children and their old folks, uprooted from their past, with no hope for the future. In that roadside estaminet a crowd of such people sat. They would sit there all night. Then they would urge their tired feet to motion again. No room for us there. But the landlord told us of another inn not far away, and here we were more lucky.

At first the woman in charge was terrified, refused to open the door. We had difficulty in persuading her we were not Boches. When she was satisfied that we were English, she did everything possible for us. Cooked us a ham omelette, gave us a pot of preserved raspberries, red wine, and coffee. We slept soundly, and by half-past seven next morning were in Beauvais, just in time to hear the Mayor telling the throng in the market- place there was no danger. Clearly they didn't believe it, nor did he. For he implored any who had guns or pistols to take them at once to the Town Hall. If the Germans came, and they were found to possess firearms, they would be shot.

Then three troopers clattered into the market-place with tales of armoured cars that had been ambushed and of mysterious shots fired at them as they rode. Moore and I decided to investigate. The tales did not sound likely. How could we know that the German advance had been so rapid? So far as we were aware Amiens still held out. (Its capture was never announced by the French communiqué's !) We drove out about ten o'clock on the road to Clermont. Half-way there we fell in with a regiment of French Territorials on the march. They were dispirited and resentful, as it was. We felt that if we swept past them, stirring up dust, they would be angry — not without reason. So we asked if there was not some other way to Clermont, and were recommended to take a side turning, a field-road.

Along that field-road, not five minutes after we had left the French troops, we saw, coming towards us at a walk, a patrol of eighteen Uhlans. No mistaking their grey uniforms, their low-crowned helmets. Under the brims of these their faces looked grim: perhaps that was due to our startled imaginations. I don't know how Moore felt. I never asked him. I was badly scared. Would they carry out their threat and shoot us? Or would they send us to the rear as prisoners? Would they take away our car?

During the few moments between our seeing them and meeting them we did some quick thinking. And when the little officer in command asked for our papers — "Vos papiers, messieurs," he said in good French — I pulled out my passport at once and handed it up to him. I knew that Moore's described him as a journalist. Mine did not say what I was. While the little officer looked at it, I looked down the barrel of what seemed to me the largest revolver in the world. It was levelled at us by a corporal, an ugly fellow who scowled and appeared anxious to use it. The troopers ranged themselves around us.

"This is no use," said the officer, handing my passport back. Now, I thought, he will ask Moore for his, and we are for it. But he did not ask. I showed him a safe-conduct signed by some mayor or other. He shook his head. "No use," he said again. Then he told the corporal to turn out the car. They opened the driver's bag and found an automatic pistol. They took that. They took all our maps. They took a newspaper which the driver had in the net above his head. He thought they wanted his bowler hat which was there. He offered this politely. "Nein, nein," said the corporal gruffly, "die Zeitung." But he almost smiled.

"Where have you come from?" the officer inquired.

We said Beauvais.

"And where are you going to?"

We said Paris.

He shot a whimsical glance at us, as much as to say, "That is where I am going too."

"Have you business there?" he went on.

"No, we are travelling for pleasure."

He frowned. "In time of war?" Then he smiled. He knew we were English. Here was confirmation of the belief which prevails all over the Continent that the English are mad. "And how are you going to Paris?" he asked thoughtfully.

"By way of Clermont." Clermont was the only place in the neighbourhood that we knew.

He brightened up. "Very well," he said. Then he added in English, "All right. It is all right." He waved his hand in the direction we were to take, then the patrol moved on.

We ought, of course, to have realized we were running into fresh danger. It was clear to us later that he was driving us into a trap. We ought to have reckoned on Clermont being occupied by the enemy. But we thought of nothing save getting away from that patrol lest the little officer should alter his mind. If we had reasoned it out, we must have concluded that we were safer with him than on the road to Clermont. For he was so close to the French in retreat, a considerable force, that he did not dare to attract attention to his handful of men by firing even a couple of revolver shots. And why should he worry about us when near by were whole regiments of Germans, and we were headed straight for them. Only by a miracle of luck did we miss heading straight into them. We made inquiries as we went along. Had any Germans been seen? Everyone said no. But just as we got into the outskirts of Clermont a man ran before us holding his hands up. "Don't come in," he cried. "The town is full of Germans."

The driver swung the car round in the broad highway and we went back towards Beauvais. Not to go there. We wanted to turn south, to rejoin those French Territorials whom we ought not to have left, to get away from this enemy-infested spot. Southward of the road, unfortunately, was a range of hills. We must go on till we found a way through them. Anxiously we looked ahead. A covered van was coming. Were there Germans in it? No, there were four French soldiers. We explained the situation quickly, that they were running into the enemy. They tumbled out of their van and piled into our car.

"If they catch us," we said, "we shall say that you took us prisoners. They won't shoot you anyway, and that might get us off." Luckily we soon came to a road running south. A chauffeur standing there by his car told us the French had turned off here. We followed them and caught them up with a fine tale to tell of our adventure. Then we made for the coast to send despatches. A few days afterwards we met that chauffeur again. He said that a few minutes after we had left the main road a hundred Uhlans, five patrols, came along sweeping everything they met or overtook into Clermont. We were only just in time. After that I never believed a French communiqué. I did not believe those of any nation, but at that date the French were certainly the most misleading. While the public supposed that the enemy were still on the frontier, they were closing in on Paris. It now seemed more than likely — it seemed almost certain — that Paris would be besieged.

From my own personal angle this was luck. I should be shut up in the city. I might not be able to get much out while the siege lasted, but what a magnificent story I should have to tell when it ended! My paper had other views. I received telegrams daily telling me to escape in time. I was not to lose my freedom of movement. I was to go with the Government from Paris to Bordeaux. All these instructions I put in my pocket, resolved to use my own judgment. I could be more useful in Paris than anywhere else. The news would be there.

Towards the end of the first week in September (the adventure with Uhlans had been at the beginning) it was evident that a battle would be fought outside Paris. Moore and I went in the direction where we knew preparations were being made. Villages were deserted, no one was in the fields, a sinister quiet hung over the landscape. Misled by the silence, the absence of any sign of danger, we nearly ran into the Germans again! We had a French soldier with us. When the loneliness, the silence, began to make themselves felt, I said, "I believe that outpost we passed a little way back was the last."

"Oh no," our poilu made answer, "they would have told us. There is no risk in going on."

But after another few miles I declared I would go no farther. Back we sped, and soon learned that I had been right. We were beyond the most advanced French outpost. If we had gone on we should have found before long the most advanced German one.

That evening three telegrams waited for me, sent to different addresses in the hope of catching me at one or other. They were from Northcliffe. These I could not, had no inclination to disregard. Next day I arranged to go to Bordeaux. A train was leaving at night. President and Ministers had gone already. Many officials of all grades were to follow in this train. I hoped fatuously that it might go through at a fair speed. At first my luck seemed to be in. I bribed a conductor to open a compartment that had been locked in case an important person should arrive at the last moment. He did not arrive. A postman and I shared it. We took a side each, congratulating each other on the chance to sleep comfortably. But at a suburban station the train stopped and our compartment was instantly crowded.

Most of our fellow-passengers were drovers who had brought cattle into Paris, in anticipation of the siege, and were going back to their homes. They smelt of their trade. They drank out of a small barrel of wine: not to be unfriendly one had to drink with them. I managed to sleep somehow, with the head of one of them on my shoulder. When it was light enough to see where we were, I discovered with dismay that we had not yet reached Orleans. When we did reach it, the cattle-men left us. We dawdled on through the hot day with frequent long halts. All the railway stations were full of wounded who were being sent to hospitals in the south-west. Luckily I had taken food with me. The only purchase I could make was of some small cantaloup melons on a stall near the line at Tours. We were not allowed to go into the station, but during our stay of some hours we could walk up and down by the metals. They were deliciously refreshing, those little melons. Not till two in the morning did we get to Bordeaux. The usual run from Paris takes eight hours. We had been on the road for thirty.

My companion, the minor postal official, was fortunate in having a bed to go to. He had confided in me during the watches of the night that it was the British Army which had saved Paris (if it was saved), and saved France. If the German advance had not been delayed by that Army, all, he said tragically, would have been over. A great many people in France thought that then. They soon forgot it.

I succeeded in getting shelter that night only by putting my foot in at an hotel door opened a few inches by a porter who said there was no room. I had received that answer at four others. Now I was taking it no longer. When he saw I was determined, the porter admitted me (you can always get your way if you are resolute enough). I slept in the hall on three chairs, slept well, thankful there was no drunken cattle-drover's head on my shoulder. Slept until the servants came and dusted me in the morning under the impression that I was a new ornament — or a Cabinet Minister. Bordeaux was full of functionaries, but life was not interesting there. As soon as I could I got back to the war area. The ban on correspondents was still being enforced, so I joined a French Red Cross detachment as a stretcher bearer, and, though it was hard work, managed to send a good many despatches to my paper. I had no experience of ambulance or hospital work, but I grew accustomed to blood and severed limbs and red stumps very quickly. Only once was I knocked out. We were in a schoolroom turned into an operating theatre. It was a hot afternoon. We had brought in a lot of wounded men who had been lying in the open for some time; their wounds crawled with lice. All of us had to act as aids to our two surgeons. Suddenly I felt the air had become oppressive. I felt I must get outside and breathe. I made for the door, walked along the passage. Then I found myself lying in the passage with a big bump on my head. However, I got rid of what was troubling my stomach, and in a few minutes I was back in the schoolroom. I did not suffer in that way again.

What caused me discomfort far more acute — because it was mental, not bodily — were the illustrations of the bestiality, the futility, the insanity of war and of the system that produced war as surely as land uncultivated produces noxious weeds: these were now forced on my notice every day. The first cart of dead that I saw, legs sticking out stiffly, heads lolling on shoulders, all the poor bodies shovelled into a pit and covered with quicklime, made me wonder what their owners had been doing when they were called up, crammed into uniforms, and told to kill, maim, mutilate other men like themselves, with whom they had no quarrel. All of them had left behind many who would be grieved, perhaps beggared, by their taking off. And all to no purpose, for nothing.

The fate of individuals impressed this on me more poignantly than slaughter in the mass. One night we had to leave a terribly mangled French soldier to die where we had found him. He could not be moved. This was outside Albert (the place where the Madonna on the church tower hung so long head downwards), when Albert was on fire. We had been taking wounded from the Casualty Clearing Station there to the big hospital in Amiens. We left with a load at five and returned towards eight. When we breasted the top of the hill overlooking the town, we saw that it was burning. We heard that a bombardment had begun soon after we started. All the inhabitants were ordered out. All the wounded had been got away. But not all of them far away. Many lay round the town. We searched for them in the dusk. The only sound that came from the town was the howling of dogs. I never heard a sound more melancholy.

We came across a group of men in varying stages of disability by the roadside. They greeted us joyfully. But there were a dozen of them. Our motor ambulances held only eight. Some of them who were almost, but not quite, walking cases, looked at us with pleading eyes. Somehow or other, after their dressings and bandages had been looked to in the red glare of the burning town, we squeezed eleven of them in. One we had to leave there. It was impossible that he could live for more than a few hours. To move him would have killed him at once.

On a little mound we left him, a truss of straw beneath his head. His features were aquiline, delicate. He was unconscious, would never be conscious again. He murmured broken phrases. As we drove off, I thought I should never cease to see that butchered body, that death-mask on its truss of straw. Within an hour or two I was sitting with the rest at supper (we had not eaten since morning), talking, laughing, forgetting the episodes of the day. It had to be so. If we had not forgotten, we should have gone mad. Experiences that in our peaceful lives would have seemed too horrible for endurance now made next to no impression on us. So quickly is callousness bred by war.

Meanness, too, it seemed to me, when I discovered that the British military powers were still on my track. They threatened to ask the French to arrest me. They warned Eric Loder, who had brought out his Rolls-Royce and was driving me about, that it was unhealthy for him to remain. Their frame of mind was spiteful and vindictive. Their methods were petty and ignoble. However, they did me a good turn, for just when the dull and dreary period of trench warfare began they succeeded in getting me recalled, and on the strength of my visits to Russia I was sent at once to Petrograd, as it had been re-named a few weeks before. Here I received another series of shocks. The Tsardom was a Colossus with feet of — not clay — but cheap cement. It had bluffed France and Britain into the belief that its armies were prepared for war: we had fancied those armies sweeping across East Prussia, occupying Berlin. Colonel Repington, of the London Times, had been deluded into calling the Tsar's forces "the steamroller." Wilton, the Petrograd correspondent of the same journal, told me on the authority of General Soukhomlinov, War Minister, that twelve million rifles were in stock. This at the time when (as I soon learned) soldiers were being sent into the front line armed with sticks!

Soukhomlinov was both badly informed and absurdly hopeful. I saw a letter written by him to an American firm which in those early days offered to erect a special plant for shell-making and to begin deliveries early in 1915. The Minister assured them that early in 1915 Russia would be well supplied and would even have ammunition to sell. This seemed to be either stupid lying or hallucination.

Neither at the period named nor in any other had the Russian armies enough shells. But very large orders had been given to British firms, and although there was no possibility (as he ought to have discovered) that these orders would be fulfilled, Soukhomlinov's statements were accepted for Press purposes as those of a responsible statesman, and circulated to the world.

Almost all newspaper men in Petrograd, resident or visiting, had been taken in by the imposing facade of the Imperial system. Harold Williams and one or two others knew that behind it there was nothing but corruption and sham. The rest, taking it at its face value, sadly misled their readers.

The city of Peter, dark at three in the afternoon, was a gloomy place when I arrived there, and news was hard to come by. Up to the end of the year two newspapers in German still appeared (many subjects of the Tsar could neither read nor speak Russian); these gave me the official daily bulletins, and supplied certain clues which could be followed up by inquiries and interviews. But official information was at best doubtful, and for a while all my efforts to get to the front, even for a visit, failed. No corre- spondents were wanted. When the German journals were suppressed, I engaged a man to read me the Russian Press. But, finding that he frequently left out the most important pieces of news as "uninteresting," I had to learn Russian so as to be able to read the papers for myself. It is not a difficult language, though its appearance makes it look so. Even if it had been a labour to acquire, the pleasure of reading Tchekov's fourteen volumes of stories and plays would have been ample reward.

After I had been a few months in Russia the new reforming zeal in me found outlet in a suggestion that, as a method of hastening peace, the British Foreign Minister should make a speech in which he should say clearly we had no desire to "crush the German People out of existence." That was an expression used by the German Chancellor: it materially influenced opinion in Germany. Let us make it plain, I urged, that we have no quarrel with the mass of the German People.

We do not wish to harm them. We wish to see them develop their fine national qualities and aptitudes alongside of us and of other nations. If they will agree to do this peacefully and amicably, we will gladly be their friends. There is room in the world for all.

What we say is this, however: against the militarism which is as hateful to the mass of them as it is to us we will fight, for years if necessary, until it is crushed and dead. We are determined to destroy it utterly. We will not go back to the state in which Europe simmered for a number of years before the war. We will not have our peace and quietness disturbed any more by the bullying and the pin-pricking and the restless, vain ambitions of the men who fondly fancied that nations become great by their rulers puffing themselves out and making themselves offensive, and loudly asserting that God had given them a special commission to impose their culture upon the whole earth. If the Imperial Chancellor meant that this spirit and its embodiment in policy could not be crushed out of existence, he was wrong. We intend to crush it out of existence, just as we crushed the Napoleonic spirit. But there is nothing further from our minds than wishing to crush the German People out of existence.

No one can say whether such a declaration would have made any difference. I believed at the time that it would. I have never changed that belief. I sent the article to Northcliffe. He told me he had shown it to members of the Cabinet, who thought any such appeal would look like weakness. I do not doubt that he thought so himself. The war atmosphere in the Mail office was indicated by a reproving cable Marlowe, the editor, sent me once when I had mentioned some kindly act by enemy soldiers. "Nothing wanted," he said, "about good kind Germans. There are no good Germans but dead Germans."

Three years later, in 1918, I was employed to conduct exactly the kind of propaganda I had proposed in 1915. According to the testimony of German generals from Hindenburg downwards it was effective. It might not have been so useful at an earlier stage. Anyway I am not relating my endeavour in order to claim credit for having made it, but merely to show how the looker-on of the so many years past had become eager to contribute towards making the world a better place to live in.

Small encouragement that eagerness got during the twenty-seven months I was in Russia. I sent home a vast quantity of matter which could not be printed, but which I thought it desirable Northcliffe and members of the Cabinet should see. The British nation did not at the time hear anything about the nearness of revolution in the autumn of 1915. Few persons who were not then in Petrograd or Moscow have ever heard of the chance the reform leaders had to force their measures on the feeble Tsar. They shrank from it partly because misguided loyalty stayed their hands; partly because they were lacking in decision, because their faith was weak. From that date it became certain that there would be a revolution ("after the war ended" was the saying), and that it would not be directed by the men in the Duma, who had shown they did not believe in themselves.

Unable to get to the front, hindered from making the Russian situation clear at home, writing continually and having only trivial stuff printed, I grew restless. Censorship at each end was stupidly strict. Once I tried to dodge it. I got wind of the change at Russian Headquarters, the Tsar taking the place of the Grand Duke Michael as Commander-in- Chief. This would certainly not have been allowed to go through. So I concocted what seemed to be a business cable, beginning with prices and prospects, and then saying:

Understand managing director retiring, and head of firm taking his place.

Then after some more commercial jargon, I signed a name I had often used in the Mail (H. A. Milton) and sent the cable to the news editor's home. At first he was puzzled, but after some thought the office solved the conundrum, and sent to the London censorship a message giving the fact of the change in command. This was kept for three days until Reuter's Agency announced it officially. Then, of course, my news was no good.

Altogether I grew more and more dissatisfied. I felt there was something to be done, and that I was not being allowed to do it. Life was not disagreeable. There was skating in winter on the frozen canals. There was the tennis club in summer. We made many friends — I say "we," for Bedelia had come out after three months of separation — otherwise I should have been more restless by far. We felt that it was intolerable for her to be at one end of the world and me at the other. So she braved the journey across the North Sea, through Norway, through Sweden, almost into the Arctic Circle at the top of the Gulf of Bothnia, over the frozen Gulf into Finland, and down the whole length of that country, and so into Russia. A week's journey like that in the middle of winter could not be decided on lightly. But when it seemed clear that I was to be in Russia for a long time she packed her trunks and set off with a resolute heart.

I find evidence of my chafing against the conditions under which I worked in letters and cables from Northcliffe. Here is one:

Sometimes your letters seem to indicate that you think I am dissatisfied. I hope, my dear Fyfe, you know me well enough to know that if I am dissatisfied I say so. Some people say I am too vigorous in saying so!

 

Every article that is received from you is submitted to me; but the censor "kills" an immense amount of matter. The articles from you that are "killed" I put before important members of the Cabinet, either verbally or in your writing, so that nothing is wasted.

 

On my return from Scotland the other day I sent you a little reassuring wire. Having myself been at the other end of a cable I thoroughly understand the feelings that arise in a man's mind when he is away from the home office. But in your case, my dear Fyfe, you should realize that at the head of affairs here is one who is warmly devoted to you personally, quite apart from business relations. You also stand high in the esteem of your colleagues.

 

Yours affectionately,

 

NORTHCLIFFE.

The "little reassuring wire" was "Excellent work lately, dear Fyfe." It was one of several, and in his letters there were invariably consoling sentences. Now it was: "You have never yet failed in your duty, and, though you are away from Carmelite House, you are always in our thoughts." Now: "I love to get letters from you. They always tell me something." So I was encouraged, inspirited; and in time several of us wore down the disinclination to recognize war correspondents: we were sent to the Front. The only one of us who had managed to get there so far was Stanley Washburn, a clever little American serving the London Times. At first he was treated like the rest. Then he had a bright idea. A Colonel McCormick arrived in Russia from America, one of the Chicago Tribune family.

As he was a colonel, he was allowed to go everywhere. But Washburn knew he was not a real colonel. He used the title because he was on the staff of a State governor. Stanley at once cabled to his State governor in Minnesota, asking for an appointment — and got it. At once he appeared in uniform, and put "Colonel Washburn" on his visiting cards. Now he, too, was made free of the Front. But he used to have difficulties very often with Russian officers, who wanted to know what branch of the service he belonged to.

Washburn, small, pale, but voluble, would reply: "Well, now, I should like to explain to you the system of the American Army." Then he would plunge into a long, intricate, unintelligible rigmarole. No one ever stayed to hear the end of it. Consequently no one knew what arm he represented — any more than Stanley did himself.

After this the rest of us clamoured more persistently and, as Russians always yield to persistence (or always did then), we won. We left the capital under snow, the Neva still solidly frozen, the skies gloomily grey. At Kiev they were blue with white spring cloudlets, and we found chestnut buds uncurling. In Odessa the sun baked, we could buy roses and carnations, we enjoyed iced drinks.

Arthur Ransome and I were to join the group of armies commanded by General Brussilov. While we waited for permission to report ourselves at headquarters we stayed for some days in Berdeechov, a town of one hundred thousand inhabitants, ninety thousand of them Jews. We were surprised to hear almost everybody speaking what sounded to us like German. It was Yiddish, which we could very nearly understand — but not quite. Ransome talked Russian well, I was at that period beginning to speak it a little, but our German was more useful. The Jews either couldn't or wouldn't use the Tsar's language. Between them and the small number of Russians living among them no active ill-will appeared, though the official Russians spoke of them with a disdainful shrug. The prevalent idea that Slavs were by nature Jew-baiters had nothing in it. Only when the police had inflamed ignorance with lying tales did pogroms occur. These were designed either to take attention off matters which might bring the Tsardom into disrepute or to hide local police scandals. So long as they were left to themselves, Russians and Jews lived peaceably together, as they did in Berdeechov. My stay in that town was useful: it taught me a good deal — though Ransome did not succeed in teaching me either to fish or to play billiards, hard though he tried, the one by day, the other in the evenings.

Brussilov was the ablest of the army-group commanders. His front was in good order. For that reason we were sent to it. The impression I got in April was that the Russian troops, all the men and most of the officers, were magnificent material who were being wasted because of the incompetence, intrigues, and corruption of the men who governed the country. In June Brussilov's advance showed what they could do, when they were furnished with sufficient weapons and ammunition. But that effort was wasted, too, for want of other blows to supplement it, for want of any definite plan of campaign.

The Russian officers, brutal as they often were to their men (many of them scarcely considered privates to be human), were as a rule friendly and helpful to us. They showed us all we wanted to see. They always cheerfully provided for Ransome, who could not ride owing to some disablement, a cart to get about in. The carts never had springs, and from the backs of my mounts, invariably good horses, I used to ache for him. Frequently, too, he was left behind, as our pace was so much the faster. Our hosts did marvels in the way of feeding us. In the dug-outs of advanced trenches we fared sumptuously — too sumptuously. Here is an entry in my diary: "Excellent lunch with vodka, wine, and liqueur brandy. The nearer to the front one gets, the better one fares."

In the stately Austrian castles which were occupied by the staffs of armies, corps, and divisions, luxuries were rare. Rare, too, were bathrooms, and one big country house in which we were quartered had no water-closets. Still, one could often get a steam-bath. These were installed, roughly enough, in the villages behind the lines where troops rested. I was surprised when I discovered that all the washing our Russian friends did in the morning was confined to having water poured over their hands and moistening face and neck. My soldier servant was sadly worried about the consequences to my health when I got him to empty a bucket over me as soon as I had shaved in the morning. Yet I had to admit that those Russians kept their skins far cleaner by their weekly steam-baths than we do by our cold tubbing.

Soon after we arrived in Galicia Easter came round. We were offered the choice between a festive night with the staff of the 18th Army Corps or attendance at a midnight mass close to the front trenches. To the surprise of the officers an American correspondent who was there and I both selected the mass. We were rewarded by one of the most impressive scenes that my recollection holds. Though it rained hard, there was a dense throng of soldiers in front of and all round the little canopy beneath which the altar was dressed. One could hear late comers squishing up through the mud in the silences between the priest's deep intoning. Austrian searchlights and rockets cut the darkness. To most of the men who stood there worshipping — to all perhaps — the miracle was a conjuring trick which somehow might affect their lives both on earth and in the hereafter. Yet I had to feel the pity and the beauty of this interlude in the hideous squalor of trench warfare. I felt the same at a Sunday morning service I once stumbled on. The larks sang, sunshine glittered on priest's vestments and altar vessels, the guns supplied a background of bass to the celebrant's thin tenor. And one August evening, on a more northerly front, I saw a roll-call in a forest where a regiment was encamped. At the bugle's command every man stood, ranks were formed; among the trees I could see lines of stiff figures in all directions, and before "dismiss" sounded they sang a soft evening hymn.

What a comment on humanity, that religion is always employed to crush the human spirit, to perpetuate mismanagement and tyranny! Organized religion, I mean. That has always been used so. Voltaire was right when he cried, "Exterminate the evil thing!" Jesus was right when he said that on the outside it might look well, but inside was foulness and make-believe. Beneath its picturesque, imposing ceremonies the Orthodox Church in Russia crept with corruption. The legend of the peasants' attachment to it was as fictitious as that of their devotion to the Tsar. They liked neither. They were afraid of both.

These truths were hidden from the British nation, even from its leaders. Newspapers did not print them — in wartime they were not allowed to. British diplomats in Russia knew next to nothing about the country or the people. Sir George Buchanan told me soon after I arrived that he had been Ambassador for eight years and had not learned to speak or read the language. It was impossible for an observer so ill-equipped, associating almost entirely with officials, to know what was going on.

The Galician mud was something new to my experience. (Napoleon spoke of it as "a fifth element created by God in Poland.") That Easter morning, going back to Tarnopol, we lost our cart in it. The rain had turned the land into a bog through which the raised highways ran like bridges. Somehow we got off our bridge and sank. We dragged the horse out; the cart we had to leave. At 3 a.m. we knocked up the people of a farmhouse and asked for the loan of a vehicle. They offered us a long farm-wagon with a pole down the middle to sit on. We sat on it for a mile or two, then we preferred to stand. Anyone who has tried that sort of riding will know why.

About the middle of August 1916 I went back to Petrograd from the northern front, and was immediately ordered to Roumania. I did not guess what this meant. I did not know the Roumanian Government had at last made up their minds to "rush to the aid of the winning side." Long before, I had been told in the Russian Foreign Office that Ion Bratianu would not let the King move a soldier until he felt sure where victory would lie. He was ready to join either combination. Who can blame him? Italy's ministers and King hesitated for months before they decided that supporting France and Britain and Russia would pay them better than carrying out their sworn obligations to Austria and Germany. Bratianu was doing his best for his nation and, as Cavour said, statesmen may do for their countries what they would be scoundrels to do for their own benefit. He might have added that any statesman who was as scrupulous in his public transactions as an honourable man is in private life would be driven from office and probably hanged as a traitor.

Bedelia had spent the summer with friends in a datcha (summer cottage) on the Gulf of Finland. Knowing, as I did, that Russia's bolt had been shot, that the Tsar's armies were not to be counted on for anything but defensive operations, I could not imagine that Roumania would choose this moment to come into the war. I thought Northcliffe had decided to give me a change of scene. I decided that such a change would do Bedelia good too. Why shouldn't she go with me to an interesting country, new to us both? She jumped at the prospect. In a couple of days we were off.

In Kiev we spent time enough to visit the vast, wealthy monastery on its bluff overlooking the Dnieper and listen, as we went through the underground passages full of mouldering saints' relics, to the never-ceasing rattle of the monks' collecting-boxes. In Odessa we heard that Roumania had joined in the lunatic adventure of war. It was on a Sunday that we finished our journey to Bucharest. At every railway station there were crowds of peasants in their gay national costumes (now they are exchanging them for reach-me- down suits of shoddy and hard felt hats): they were hurrahing and singing songs of patriotic defiance. All through the troubles of their country, overrun by the enemy, devastated, compelled to an ignoble peace, I never forgot those peasants on that scorching Sunday, deluded by their rulers, cheering for a disaster that was to ruin the homes of many of them, to rob many of their lives.

Bucharest was divided into two parties — a large one that cheered like the peasants, a small one that foresaw the catastrophe which was to follow. As was usual in times of political excitement, the police had closed the principal teashop, so that gossip might be checked. This showed us what Bucharest was — more a village than a city; a pleasant village enough, though its flatness makes it oppressively hot in summer and muddy when it rains. The first officers we saw, curled and corseted, made us feel as the Duke of Wellington felt about the volunteers of his day: "I don't know what effect they may have on the enemy, but by God they terrify me." When I was with the Roumanian troops I found that the uniformed lounge lizards of the capital were exceptions to the general run of officers, who were neither worse nor better than those of other armies. Some that I came across were splendid soldiers. The men, too, were good military material, tough, enduring, courageous. They were sacrificed, as their comrades elsewhere, to the folly and incompetence of the men at the top.

Roumania did not enter the war at that moment because its rulers thought the right time had come. They were forced to march by the Entente Powers. Chiefly by the Russian Foreign Office.

The Russian military leaders did not at that juncture want Roumanian intervention. For some reason the politicals put a pistol to Bratianu's head. Yet they made no attempt to provide the new ally with a plan of campaign, fitting in with operations elsewhere. The Roumanians were left to do what they chose, and they chose wrong. They wanted Transylvania, so they invaded Transylvania, instead of turning their arms first against Bulgaria.

A few days after I arrived in Bucharest, Queen Marie, sitting on a bed in her hospital, smoking a cigarette and swinging her legs, told me that no other decision was possible. "Our people are so eager to rescue their Transylvanian brothers from the Austrian tyranny that they would not have allowed us to move in any direction but across the mountains." That was what this pretty woman without brains had picked up from the talk around her. What those who talked thus did not see was that an attack in the direction of Constantinople would have been of value to the whole Entente effort; it might have brought down the Central Powers in 1916. Then Transylvania would have fallen into Roumania's lap. But it would be unfair to blame Roumanian statesmen for not seeing this: the Entente leaders did not see it either.

One man who was not deceived about the uselessness of Roumanian "support," nor about the mistake made in letting the advance be made into Transylvania, was the British officer accredited to the Bucharest Government. Colonel Thomson he was then, a man whose charm of manner and gift of light conversation hid from most people his penetrating mind. He and Bedelia and I struck up a close acquaintance. He and the Queen were the two most attractive personalities in the place: in each case good looks, an easy friendliness, and a captivating smile had much to do with it. But there was behind Thomson's agreeable facade an intellect rare even among British Engineer officers. Whether it was an intellectual process which led him to join the Labour Party with me at the end of the war I will not offer to decide. I fancy that his small talk rather than his deep thinking made him a favourite with Ramsay MacDonald, and so procured Thomson his peerage and his appointment to be Minister for Air. But no one questioned his fitness for either.

Thomson had one failing at this period. He was accustomed to give orders. He was not accustomed to have his methods questioned or discussed. When his methods concerned us, we felt — the correspondents, I mean — that we were entitled to discuss them. We wanted to get to the front. We expected help from him, and did not think he was giving it as he might. When we said so, he was inclined to treat us as if we were his subordinates, members of his staff. I saw there was only one course to take. I deliberately lost my temper and jumped straight down his throat. We had a tremendous row, the others backing me up silently. After that our intimacy ripened quickly into friendship, which shows what a good fellow he was. He proved immensely helpful, too, all through the difficult months of the Roumanian retreat.

What I had to do before the difficulties became too harassing was to get Bedelia away. For the second time I had carried her into the war area. And this was not like being in France, only a few hours from home. The journey from Roumania to Petrograd took in those days at least a week.

That journey, however, she must face. For the air bombing of Bucharest was too much for any woman's nerves. By day aeroplanes, by night airships, flew quite low down, knowing the city had no defences. They did mount a machine-gun on the roof of our hotel. I saw officers firing revolvers — to hearten themselves with the noise, I supposed, Chinese fashion. These measures were not calculated to hinder aerial bombardment. One bout lasted for seventy-two continuous hours.

They were not powerful bombs, but one nearly knocked Thomson out. This was in the first night attack. I woke suddenly between two and three. I heard a pulsating sound. Twin motors, I thought, and jumped out of bed. Our room had French windows. I pushed them open, looked up and saw the silvery pencil-like form of a Parsefal. As I did so, there was a flash and a roar; the windows were flung back; I took a flying leap into bed. Next instant another explosion close by shook the room. One more further off and then quiet. I slept till morning (Bedelia did not). We heard before we were dressed that Thomson's house had been hit.

Luckily the bomb landed on a corner only and damaged badly only one room where a young British officer, Thomson's chief assistant, had his bed buried in plaster and broken glass, but was not much hurt. What the bombers were trying for was the house of Bratianu. In his garden, which almost adjoined ours, the first missile fell. We moved at once away from this quarter to the outskirts. But the daily and nightly visitation went on. Indoors we were frequently summoned to the cellar. Whenever we went out, we were pretty sure to hear the whistles blown and the thudding of heavy shutters hastily let down over shop-fronts. There was not much danger really. Not many people were killed. But it got on Bedelia's nerves. I was very much relieved when I found that an American colleague, Arthur Ruhl, who had been with me also on the Russian front, and whom we both liked, was starting for Moscow. Bedelia started with him. We hated the separation, but we were both glad when the train moved. Gladder still was she when, after encountering every kind of misfortune, she reached Petrograd on the seventh day — only to find that the friends she hoped to stay with were absent and their house shut up. However, she found others happy to take her in — and remained with them for the next three months.

Those months saw the pitiful drama of Roumania's betrayal by the Allied Governments carried through to its end. The country had been dragged into the war without any forethought of what it was to do, how even it should protect itself. It became evident very soon that its fate would be the fate of Serbia unless some very energetic effort were made by its Allies. I wanted to state this bluntly in a despatch. The Foreign Minister (M. Duca) refused to pass it. I always took my cables to him. Usually he was reasonable enough. Now he took offence at the comparison of his country with Serbia. "Like Serbia? That is unthinkable," he said. "I cannot allow it to be suggested that we are unable to defend ourselves." So my appeal, and the appeals which other correspondents would have sent, were suppressed. A few weeks later that same Minister (at a later date he became Premier) was begging me, with tears running down his cheeks, to urge London and Paris to "do something." I had to tell him it was too late.

When some of us were sent to the Front we found ourselves very soon with an army that was making all the haste it could to get away from the enemy. It was at first an orderly retreat, not like that which followed the Battle of Mons. As it became more headlong, ranks were broken, discipline defied. The soldiers who streamed through Bucharest just before it was occupied were less like an army than a mob. Twenty-three full divisions put into the field in August had dwindled to half a dozen before the year ended. The Roumanian soldiers were material as good as the Russians. Many of the officers had ability and character. Like the Russian armies, the Roumanian were sacrificed to the incompetence of the country's rulers.

While I was in Bucharest I used to go every morning with Constantine Brown, then of the London Times, now in Washington, to get what information we could from Take Ionesco, the ablest among the politicians. From him we learned that Bratianu spent much time weeping and reading the Bible. He saw that he had brought disaster on his nation, but had no idea how to mend matters. So his brother filled his pockets, and the foolish pride of the Minister for Foreign Affairs was allowed to prevent aid being asked for.

In the retreat we had to get what transport we could, and usually to secure our own food. We were supposed to be attached to the headquarters staff of the army in flight, but often it got ahead of us, and we did not know where it was. I remember one night catching up with some of its members in a town (Barlad, I think) whose streets were crowded already with tired and hungry troops. They had a train, we heard, and went to the railway station to make sure. Here they were making a meal of bread and tea in the deserted restaurant. Brown and I pulled out of our haversacks half a fowl, a bottle of wine, and some apples to share with them; thus we traded on their gratitude to get a compartment on the train. I never knew till then how cold an unheated railway carriage can be on a bitter night with snow in the air.

The food difficulties at this time seemed trifling when we looked back on them after we had moved with the Government from the capital to Jassy. This move was decided on in a hurry. Officials, foreign Ministers and their legation staffs, anyone who could get a pass for the special trains, the only ones running, spent long weary hours in them, and when they reached Jassy found that no effort had been made to provide them with lodgings: they had to find accommodation for themselves, Ministers and all. Brown and I were soon comfortably housed. He spoke Roumanian.

Outside the railway station we hurled our bags into a cab. The driver cried out that he was engaged for M. Take Jonesco, one of Roumania's leading politicians. "Right," said Brown, "this is M. Jonesco", and pointed at me. The man looked me over and seemed satisfied. We drove off. The British Minister, Sir George Barclay, was not so lucky. Hours later, when we had settled into our lodging, we met His Excellency pushing a wheelbarrow with his baggage in it, and still searching for a temporary Legation.

We got a room with two beds in a Jewish house, and though the landlady could only give us breakfast (coffee, bread, and quince marmalade), we came to look on that as our best meal of the day. There were two restaurants in the town, a place of some eighty thousand, suddenly flooded with many thousands of visitors. If any food could be got, it was mostly unappetizing. Beans were the stand-by. Unless you went early, you were likely to be told "Nothing but beans left." However, they were good beans, nourishing and savoury, something like "Boston baked." I almost lived on them, and from that time I have not eaten butcher's meat, finding I was better without it. Whisky was another thing I dropped because for a time I could not get it. This was in Petrograd. It could be bought at a pound a bottle, but I had no wish for it at that price, and soon I lost the wish for it at any price. Spirits and red meat account for a large amount of illness between them. So those dirty little restaurants in that Roumanian frontier town have a grateful place in my recollection after all.

A couple of days after we had moved to Jassy, Thomson announced that he was going to see how Bucharest was. He really wanted to find out how a certain Roumanian princess was. Brown and I asked him to take us along. He agreed. As soon as the British Minister heard about the trip, he begged Brown and me to do him a service. We thought he was going to tell us some important document or cipher had been left behind.

"You know the dining-room at the Legation," he said. We knew it well. "In a cupboard behind the door, of which this is the key, you will find . . ."

Now, thought Brown and I, it is coming. State papers, the Foreign Office code, list of names of British agents, which is it? It was none of these. What Sir George Barclay wanted was — jam.

"You will find in that cupboard a number of pots of jam. The kind I like best is gooseberry. Bring some of that and any other. I shall be very greatly obliged."

Some people who were told of this (we couldn't keep it to ourselves) indignantly denounced him. "When you are risking your lives, to think about jam!" But it seemed funny to me. We won his gratitude by rescuing half a dozen pots for him. The rest the Germans got, I suppose. But they did not get any of his favourite gooseberry.

There was not much risk after all. Thomson in a book, part true, part fiction, gave a lurid account of a running fight with an enemy mounted patrol. That was his invention. We were warned about German cavalry and changed our route, but we saw none. Bucharest was quiet, resigned to its lot. The Germans entered it the next day. That ended Roumania's short, ill-directed effort. The country had been treated "like Serbia." Yet the Germans did not get the oil they wanted. That had been taken care of. I saw thirty million pounds' worth of oil and oil machinery destroyed in a few days. Up went the flames, down the wells went the machinery, and we are paying for the damage still. The Allied Governments suggested burning the wheat as well, enormous quantities of it. To that Bratianu would not agree. It helped the Germans through that winter and, since they paid for it well, many Roumanian farmers have pleasant memories of the German occupation.

The war in Roumania being over, there was no need for me to stay. On Christmas Eve I left Jassy in a Red Cross train. At the frontier station I had to turn out. I slept on the floor of the buffet with my haversack for pillow, and woke to find all the tea gone. There are some drawbacks to being a sound sleeper! Worse than this, I was told that all the places on the train for Kiev were gone too. I had to exert myself to get on that train. Luckily I found three French officers who had two compartments and took me in with them. We spent three days getting to Kiev, but they passed pleasantly, for the Frenchmen were good talkers and could play bridge.

From Kiev we went on to Mogeelov, which was their destination. Here the Russian General Headquarters had been for many months. And here from other French officers we heard great news. At last, they told us, the Army chiefs had been convinced that the Empress's clique of sycophants and profiteers was ruining Russia's effort. They were going to tell the Tsar so, and to insist on his accepting constitutional government. General Verhovsky, who was afterwards Minister of War under Kerensky, had gone to Petrograd to tell Ministers the Army would fight no longer unless this change were made. There had been one serious mutiny. The Government was suspected of being pro- German. Conditions must be entirely altered.

General Russki was one of the most prominent in the plot. General Brussilov had given his approval. On January 25th (12th in the Russian calendar) the Tsar would be presented with their demands. Then the Liberal reformers and the big business men, who were eager to help, but had been so far treated like dangerous revolutionaries, would be made Ministers; the system would be an autocracy no longer.

It sounded likely enough. I believed it to be true. I still believe it was true. And so believing, I had to make up my mind quickly what to do. If I stayed, as of course I longed to, there would be no chance of getting any news out. Whatever happened, the ban on cables would be absolute. And when it was removed, a flood of messages would be sent; it would be a toss-up whose went off first. Possibly none might get through at all. If, on the other hand, I went to London, I should be able, when the generals' plot matured, to explain what it meant, why it was necessary, what effects it would have. A London paper with articles by one of its correspondents just returned from Russia would be in a better position than any other to throw light on what was happening.

By the time I reached Petrograd I had made my decision. I would return in good time. It was on December 30th that I got to the capital, and within half an hour of my arrival I heard another piece of news that for the moment put my plans on one side. Rasputin had been killed the night before. Not a line in the newspapers about it, though the details were known in every office. Nothing to be gathered from official sources of information. By noon next day, however, I had pieced the story together and written several thousand words, which I asked the Embassy to send in a bag leaving that night. This account of Rasputin and his end, the first that had appeared in the British Press, giving the history of his relations with the Russian Court, was not released by the British Censor until after I myself had arrived in London more than a month later. It was published with all possible prominence. In it (also in a speech I made at the Aldwych Club) I gave more information about the state of Russia than had been published in any shape before. The speech gained me this note from Northcliffe:

MY DEAR FYFE,

 

I enjoyed your most interesting and eloquent address more than I can tell you, and I am proud of my Fyfe.

 

Your affectionate

 

CHIEF.

It was that effort which started me as a lecturer. The director of the Lecture Agency heard it, and immediately offered to book engagements for me. It was a long time before I could take advantage of this.

In my article and in my speech I was permitted to hint at events which might follow the putting away of Rasputin. But they did not follow. The Russian fondness for delay made the conspirators decide that it would be discourteous to have a revolution while Lord Milner was in the country. He had gone out to make inquiries for the British Government; he returned saying there was no likelihood of any outbreak. He had hardly got back when the March disturbances began. I was then in Spain.

Our journey home from Russia had been disagreeable. As I wanted to get to London as soon as possible I bustled the Passport Office in Petrograd, made them move more quickly than usual. In revenge, they had me stripped three times and Bedelia twice on the journey — at the Russian frontier into Finland, at the Finnish frontier of Sweden, and, most annoying of all, at Newcastle by British searchers. This was simply spite, to pay me out for my persistence in asking for passport visas within a week. Through Sweden and Norway we travelled comfortably and without annoyance. In Stockholm I could buy German newspapers and see how they told about us exactly the same lying stories that the British and French Press were telling about them. At Bergen we had to wait several days because our trunks had gone astray. Every morning they were expected to- morrow. At last we lost patience and took ship without them. Just as well we did, for the next boat, in which they were, was torpedoed and we were left with nothing more in the way of clothes than we carried in our hand baggage. We were glad enough, though, that we had not gone to the bottom of the North Sea with them.

I was sent to Spain for three reasons. First, I was supposed to need a holiday and sunshine. Next, I was to do some propaganda lecturing. Thirdly, I had this instruction from Northcliffe: "Lloyd George believes the Madrid people are anxious to come in, and has asked me if you would try to find out their terms. Be tactful and wire me vaguely."

That was an example of the Lloyd George method, the method which made him unlike other politicians. He knew that a journalist with any experience could find out what a Government wanted far more quickly than an Ambassador. And, knowing this, he acted upon it. Among other politicians he was like a man who understood life among a pack of children. Even when the others were aware that official methods were slow and often untrustworthy, they did not venture to sidestep them. He took what seemed the nearest road to his goal. That was the explanation of his successes — and of his failures.

I was very soon able to wire Northcliffe that Madrid had no inclination whatever to run the risk of suffering as Roumania had suffered. The Spanish Government was not in want of anything that could be obtained by joining the war. The political leaders, whom I saw, were agreed as to the desirability of keeping their country neutral. I certainly could not blame them. It was spring then — blossom-time in the north, orange time in the centre, rose-time in Seville. To think of this land being scarred with trenches, pitted with shell- holes; of the courteous, hard-working Spanish peasants being driven from their homes; of towns being laid in ruins and villages wiped out, was horrible to one who had seen these things happen in France, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Austria, Roumania. I hoped Spain would stay out, however much Lloyd George wanted them in.

The British Prime Minister had a great name among the Spanish masses. One day in the train a man I was talking to expressed his enormous, his unbounded admiration for a countryman of mine whom he called Yo Horrkay. "Who?" I said. "Yo Horrkay, your great Primo Ministro." Then I suddenly realized that Lloyd would be pronounced in Spanish something like "Yo," and that "Horrkay" is their usual pronunciation of George. No wonder my train acquaintance thought me unresponsive at first!

My lectures were about Russia. I went hopelessly wrong in telling my audiences (I spoke in French) that the Revolution would benefit the Allied effort. However, I got in some useful hits at monarchy, and may have done the Republican cause a little good. Outward appearances suggested then that the Church was too strong for that cause to prosper. I sat up all night in Seville to see the Holy Week procession of the confraternities and their images hung with jewels. I did not think, as I watched the hundreds of hooded figures holding torches move slowly through the streets, that I should see a Republic established and a bar set up against bigotry. Religion in Spain was not so entirely superstitious as in Russia, but it was based in ignorance and fear. It withered under the beams of enlightened common sense.

In Portugal I lectured too, and paid a visit to the President of the Republic which amused me by its proof that a country may abolish monarchy, yet remain in essentials more monarchical than ever. This President was a pleasant old fellow, talkative, intelligent, well-read; but he was hedged about (I dare say against his inclination) by flunkeys, aides-de-camp, major-domos, private secretaries with capital letters; and he lived in one of those terrible royal palaces, all red velvet and marble pillars, and long successions of apartments all looking exactly the same and all entirely without character.

Why, I asked myself (and still ask myself), do not governing men work in large important offices to correspond with the importance of that work to the nation, and when they have finished for the day go home and live like ordinary folk? The mixture of the social with the political is the cause of much bad government. It is a hang-over from monarchical days, when deference had to be extorted by a mode of life more ceremonious and self- indulgent than that of the mass. Downing Street is out of date. That palace in Lisbon reeked of royalty.

I had been back in London only a few days from Portugal when I was sent to the Italian Front. Here war had picturesqueness. Fighting in the mountains was fantastic, bizarre even. Peaks were fortified. Galleries were drilled through solid rock, with openings that gave you sight of Austrian openings in mountains opposite. From these strange gun emplacements artillerymen and machine-gunners blazed away at one another, and did little harm. Then there were trenches cut in ice, at a height where it always freezes after sunset. Everything had to be got up to these positions by "travellers" on wire ropes.

The first time I went up in a teleferica I did not care for the look of the box I sat in: it was too much like a coffin. I got used to this, and to being swung up to a height of eight or ten thousand feet in less than half as many seconds. It took me longer to get accustomed to conditions at that altitude. I found the thin atmosphere trying. I suffered for a day or two from a form of mountain sickness. I had to wear snow goggles to protect my eyes. My face became first scarlet and then skinless from the combined effect of sun and snow. I discovered for the first time, as I scrambled up an almost perpendicular rock-face and clung with the desperate energy of a drowning man to a rope which hung from the top, what it meant to be forty-seven years of age.

But to be in such sparkling, bracing air and amid such loveliness, and in the company of Alpini was worth more inconveniences than these. The Alpini were Italy's finest troops. To them the defence of the mountain frontier was given. They struck me as being more like chamois than men. They leapt about in places where a slip meant destruction, with not merely a disregard of danger, but seemingly unconscious of it. They stood on crags with eternity around and below them just as one sees chamois standing. They ran down slopes where their visitor sought each separate foothold most carefully, with an apparent longing to be dashed to pieces.

In stifling, sizzling Udine, where General Cadorna had his headquarters, I spent as little time as possible. One day Perceval Gibbon, novelist and short-story writer as well as newspaper man, said he had never seen Venice. We got leave to go. I shall not forget that visit — for many reasons. What sticks in my memory more clearly than the darkened Piazza with a few people sitting silently at tables instead of the chattering, laughing throng of peace-time, or the sandbagged front of St. Mark's and the bricked-up arches of the Doge's Palace, or the grey and wrinkled gondoliers who took the places of their handsome, smiling sons or grandsons — what I recollect most vividly is something that Gibbon said to me as we stood on one of the bridges in the morning sunlight. "If one had this all the time," he muttered, "one wouldn't want drink or women." I knew then what was ruining him. He longed for the stimulus, the thrill of beauty. He felt his life was empty. He tried to fill it, for want of any better content, with the dust and ashes of debauchery. There was tragedy in that confession of his. He was sent away from the Italian Front, went from bad to worse, died at the age when he should have been doing his best work.

Another incident of that time which I did not forget was a meal we had one evening high up among the Dolomites with Alpini officers. An excellent meal, varied, well-cooked, well- served. After coffee, smoking our long Londra cigars, we saw the men who had come from their wooden huts, fixed to the sheer rock like birds' nests, to get their suppers. Stew was ladled out of a cauldron into tin plates, thin red wine poured into tin mugs, hunks of coarse bread passed round. They ate standing or squatting in corners. It was like seeing animals fed. Why were these differences tolerated? They had not struck me before I began to think about things. If I had noticed them, I should have said: "There must be differences between officers and men. Besides, it is what the men are used to." I could not satisfy myself with such poor answers now.

In Cortina one day I was handed a telegram. It called me back to London. When I got there, I was told Northcliffe had sent for me to join him in the United States, where he had been for some weeks. He was head of the British War Mission. I started at once.

Among the passengers across the Atlantic was my old friend Norman Angell (who, when first I knew him in Paris, had a big, fan-shaped orange-tawny beard). From him I have learned much at all times. On that voyage, made longer by delays in Irish loughs to avoid enemy submarines, we talked incessantly. I owed to Angell, when we reached New York, a clarification of my ideas which was of the greatest value to me. It did not, however, make me enthusiastic about the effervescent war spirit ("war sherbet" would have been a more apt description) which bubbled up in the Americans as soon as their country had joined those of the Entente. In spite of President Wilson's efforts to create in the American people a sense of the gravity of the hour for them and for Europe, they went madder than any other people. They were more intolerant of any glimmer of reason, more cruel in their resentment, more boastful in their threats of what they would do. They certainly did well. They saved France and Britain. It was the arrival of American troops in their hundreds of thousands that broke the German resistance. When those troops got to France they were as different from the noisy mobs of kill-and-eat patriots as the soldiers of all armies were vastly more sensible and decent than their countryfolk at home. But that "war sherbet" of 1917 was an unpleasant mixture.

When I arrived I went to Northcliffe's office and was received by a tall, thin, friendly man in uniform, with an agreeable Canadian accent and a very intelligent face. This was my first acquaintance with Campbell Stuart.

He was living with Northcliffe and some secretaries in a house on Long Island Sound, a house which was in America a very old one, built a hundred years before, and called in the English fashion Bolton Priory. There I went to live too. What Northcliffe told me in explanation of his summons was that he wanted me to write articles and speeches for him to sign and deliver, and make myself generally useful. Then he added that he had felt the need of a friend.

Stuart was too recent and too young. He was immensely efficient. He ran the War Mission as he afterwards ran the propaganda department at Crewe House in London with quiet, never-ruffled capability and untiring drive. But Northcliffe wanted someone who knew him at home (as schoolboys say), to whom he could talk intimately. My affection for him was made by this mark of confidence even warmer than it had been, yet after this period our relation was to become less and less close as the years went by. Partly this was due to the mental change in him caused by the American estimate of his power. He was openly hailed as the most powerful man in Britain. This legend, issuing from the romanticism of American newspaper men, was readily accepted. He came to believe in it himself. Up to then he had been like a boy in his enjoyment of the influence his papers could exert, but he had not exaggerated that influence. He would have laughed at speeches of adulation such as were addressed to him in American cities. He did laugh at them sometimes now. But it was easy to see that he had begun to take himself more seriously. He had begun to figure to himself as a Great Man.

This made no difference in him to the outward view. He was as kind, as amusing, as caustic in his comments, as keenly susceptible to the delight of tranquil evenings after busy days as ever. We used to sit lazily talking in the warm dusk with the scents of the Priory garden about us; or on colder nights indoors the gramophone would be turned and he would demand the most torturing of Hawaiian or jazz tunes in order to enjoy seeing some of us writhe. One evening a week he went to bed before dinner, and liked me to read to him as a preparation for sleep. He never cared for any but desultory conversation in the evening. He said it was better to let the mind lie fallow, and so make it ready for complete repose. He always went to bed early. Then Stuart and I would sit up discussing everything in the world, or would stroll in the darkness, arguing in hushed voices and finding we agreed on one thing — the stupid futility of war.

Of that the most alert American mind we encountered, the mind of Colonel House, was convinced. Upon intellectual issues he was ahead of everyone in public life. He saw further, he understood more deeply, he was entirely free from the prejudices and superstitions which affect nearly all American public men, and he wanted nothing for himself. President Wilson had not such quick perceptions, so clear a view of events and personalities. Wilson inspired respect, admiration, but not liking. Cecil Spring Rice, whose wit far exceeded his diplomatic ability, hit the President off neatly in his remark to a Senator who had complained that Wilson was "just a Scottish Presbyterian."

"Yes," agreed the British Ambassador, "from Ulster."

"Why, what difference does that make?" asked the Senator, surprised. Spring Rice told him smoothly: "All the difference between an alligator and a lizard."

I had more time now than in earlier visits to study the American social system. I discovered that its problem was the same as Europe's (in every sense but the geographical the United States are a part of Europe). Class distinctions were less obvious, but they existed, and were tending to become more marked. That was partly because the rich imitated English ways, and so roped themselves off from the mass of their countryfolk. I stayed with a man of great wealth at Newport, the fashionable seaside place. His house and servants and mode of living were even more English than anything I had ever seen in England. There was a touch of exaggeration in everything. I felt as if I were acting in a play and was thankful I had taken all the right clothes for my part. It was a relief, when I got back to New York, to eat at a Cafeteria or a Child's and wear my shabbiest suits. On what was called the "Gold Coast" of Massachusetts I was the guest of people as rich, but less imitative. There was culture here, informed talk, libraries where books were read, an interest in the best that was being written and thought. But this culture was itself a barrier — and a refuge. These people lived in a luxurious world of their own, remote from that of the toilers for wages.

Certainly the walls between classes were less lofty and less firmly fixed than in England. The well-to-do did not speak with a different accent, or use a special tone of cold command in addressing their "inferiors." Passing from poverty and menial employment to comfort, even wealth was far easier. But as we travelled about the country, every city showed by its big estates on the outskirts, its pleasant suburbs, by the drab streets and alleys where the poor crowded together, that what Lecky wrote of England, when prosperity had come to those who profited by the Industrial Revolution, was equally true of the United States.

Wealth was immensely increased, but the inequalities of its distribution were aggravated. The quarters of the rich and poor became more distant, and every great city soon presented those sharp divisions of classes and districts in which the political observer discovers one of the most dangerous symptoms of revolution.

Revolution! About this time people began to be afraid of the word. The sham overturn in Russia, which proved the correctness of the surmise that the Duma reformers would not know how to satisfy the masses, was followed, while I was in America, by the real thing. Historians a hundred years hence will probably call that second change of government in Russia the only "real thing" of its period. The war was a product of trade rivalry, artificial hatreds, childish ambitions. The makers of what they called Peace were, excepting Wilson, shadows thrown by national folly and ignorance: puppets obedient to strings which often existed only in their fancy. The provisions of their Treaty were most of them purely fantastic. The Russian Revolution started a new epoch in the annals of mankind.

Because I suggested that its results might not be so bad as was feared, and defended Lenin and Trotski from the charge of being hooligan adventurers, I was labelled Bolshevik. Yet for a long time I doubted whether Soviet methods were unavoidable, even in Russia. For most people it was enough that they were Socialist methods: on that account they must be damnable. What Socialism meant very few indeed troubled to discover. On the voyage back to England in November Lord Reading was of Northcliffe's party. He had been of high value as financial adviser. He was learned in the law. He had sat in the House of Commons. We were the only two members of the party who appeared regularly at breakfast, and we used to sit on after we had finished, chatting to pass the time. I found Lord Reading a charming, entertaining talker, but all he could contribute to a discussion on Socialism was the very old story of the Man with Two Pigs.

My next assignment was to the British Front in France. What a contrast I found there — in the comfortable chateau allotted to the correspondents, in the officers placed at their service, in the powerful cars at their disposal — to the conditions prevailing in the early months of the war! Then we were hunted, threatened, abused. Now everything possible was done to make our work interesting and easy — easy, that is, so far as permits and information and transport were concerned. What a contrast, too, to the other Fronts on which I had served! No riding now — the distances were too great. (Just as well perhaps, for several correspondents had never been across a horse's back.) No scrounging for food: we had a lavishly provided mess. No sleeping on hay or the bare floors of empty houses: our bedrooms were furnished with taste as well as every convenience, except fitted basins and baths. But then we each had a servant, who brought in a tin tub and filled it after he had brought early morning tea — for those who liked it.

I felt a little bit ashamed to be housed in what, after my experiences, I could not but call luxury. It had an unfortunate result too, in cutting us off from the life of the troops. I made application soon after I arrived to be allowed to stay in the trenches with a friend commanding a battalion of the Rifle Brigade. No correspondent, I learned, had done this. They knew only from hearsay how life in the front line went on. I was glad of my visit, which included a crawl across No Man's Land in the darkness with a listening-in party, and the formalities of handing over to a relieving battalion and going into rest billets. We reached these about 2 a.m. At five I woke and heard a tremendous bombardment going on far away. As I knew an attack was expected, I thought "This is it." But it did not come till some weeks later. Then followed the nightmarish five days of the Fifth Army's roll-up before overwhelming forces of the enemy.

This was no surprise to us at the Chateau Rollencourt.

To begin with, I had been told at the War Office that "they didn't want any more of my 1914 stuff in the event of another retreat." The true story of my despatch about the Mons disaster was not known even there. Then early in February General Gough told Philip Gibbs and me and some others that he was holding part of the Fifth Army front very thinly, although the onslaught would probably be made on this part of the British line. "Information" at G.H.Q,. had made this discovery. The French would not believe it. They thought the Germans meant to attack them, and went on thinking so until the blow fell just where General Gough expected it. Why was the line still thinly held? Because there were not enough British troops in France to strengthen it, and Haig would not tell the British Government he must have more. He was responsible for the defe