It was a reward for
many mournful days, for much agony of spirit, for hours of danger--
some of us had walked often in the ways of death--and for exhausting
labors which we did so that the world might know what British soldiers
had been doing and suffering.
X
I came to know General Headquarters more closely when it removed, for
fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once within sight
of the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below its hill, but
now looking across a wide vista of richly cultivated fields where many
hamlets are scattered among clumps of trees. One came to G. H. Q. from
journeys over the wild desert of the battlefields, where men lived in
ditches and "pill-boxes," muddy, miserable in all things but spirit,
as to a place where the pageantry of war still maintained its old and
dead tradition. It was like one of those pageants which used to be
played in England before the war--picturesque, romantic, utterly
unreal. It was as though men were playing at war here, while others
sixty miles away were fighting and dying, in mud and gas-waves and
explosive barrages.
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