It was the
only way, and the soldier's way. There was no hugging of grief when
our best friend fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's life, and then,
"Carry on!"
XVIII
Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme, I
passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the
Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there and
elsewhere. One of my first meetings with him was extraordinarily
embarrassing to me for a moment or two. While he was organizing his
army, which was to be called, with unconscious irony, "The Army of
Pursuit"--the battles of the Somme were a siege rather than a pursuit-
-he desired to take over the chateau at Tilques, in which the war
correspondents were then quartered. As we were paying for it and liked
it, we put up an opposition which was most annoying to his A.D.C.'s,
especially to one young gentleman of enormous wealth, haughty manners,
and a boyish intolerance of other people's interests, who had looked
over our rooms without troubling to knock at the doors, and then said,
"This will suit us down to the ground.
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