“ G.H.Q. ”

“Oh, Lord!” I groaned. “Again?” and looked across the fields of corn to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that day⁠—or yesterday was it?⁠—kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer⁠ ⁠… How sweet was the scent of the clover tonight! And how that star twinkled above the low flashes of gunfire away there in the salient.

“They want us to waste your time,” said the officer. “Those were the very words used by the Chief of Intelligence⁠—in writing which I have kept. ‘Waste their time!’⁠ ⁠… I’ll be damned if I consider my work is to waste the time of war correspondents. Don’t those good fools see that this is not a professional adventure, like their other little wars; that the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to know what its men are doing? They have a right to know.”