With the Colonel’s full consent, we went “on strike” and said the war could go on without us, as we would not write a single word about the impending battles until all the new restrictions were removed. This ultimatum shocked G.H.Q. to its foundations—or at least the Intelligence side of it. After twenty-four hours of obstinate command, the ancient one was sent back to his lair, our privileges were restored, but Colonel Faunthorpe was made the scapegoat of our rebellion, and deposed from his position as our chief.
We deplored his departure, for he had been great and good to us. One quality of his was a check to our restlessness, nervousness, and irritability in the wear and tear of this strange life. He had an infinite reserve of patience. When there was “nothing doing” he slept, believing, as he said, in the “conservation of energy.” He slept always in the long motor drives which we made in our daily routine of inquiry and observation. He slept like a babe under shell fire, unless activity of command were required, and once awakened to find high explosive shells bursting around his closed car, which he had parked in the middle of a battlefield, while his driver was painfully endeavoring to hide his body behind a mud bank.... Colonel Faunthorpe is now “misgoverning the unfortunate Indians”—it is his own phrase—as Commissioner at Lucknow, with command of life and death over millions of natives whom he understands as few men now alive.
India was well represented in the group of censors attached to our organization, for we had two other Indian officials with us—Captains Reynolds and Coldstream, both men of high education, great charm of character, and unfailing sense of humor. For Reynolds I had a personal affection as a wise, friendly, and humorous soul, with whom I tramped in many strange places where death went ravaging, always encouraged by his cool disregard of danger, his smiling contempt for any show of fear.
Coldstream was a little Pucklike man, neat as a new pin, damnably ironical of war and war correspondents, whimsical, courteous, sulky at times, like a spoiled boy, and lovable. He is back in India, like Reynolds and Faunthorpe, helping to govern our Empire, and doing it well.
Our commanding officers and censors changed from time to time. It was a difficult and dangerous position to be O. C. war correspondents, for such a man was between two fires—our own resentment (sometimes very passionate) of regulations hampering to our work, and the fright and anger of G.H.Q. if anything slipped through likely to create public criticism or to encourage the enemy, or to depress the spirit of the British people.
Colonel Hutton Wilson, who was our immediate chief for a time, was a debonair little staff officer with the narrow traditions of the Staff College and an almost childlike ignorance of the press, the public, and human life outside the boundaries of his professional experience, which was not wide. He was amiable, but irritating to most of my colleagues, with little vexatious ways. Personally I liked him, and I think he liked me, but he had a fixed idea that I was a rebel, and almost a Bolshevik.
Later in the war he was succeeded by Colonel the Honorable Neville Lytton, the grandson of Bulwer Lytton, the great novelist, and the brother of the present Lord Lytton. Neville Lytton was, and is, a man of great and varied talent, as painter, musician, and diplomat. In appearance as well as in character he belongs to the eighteenth century, with a humorous, whimsical face, touched by side whiskers, and a most elegant way with him. He is a gentleman of the old school (with a strain of the gypsy in his blood), who believes in “form” above all things, and the beau geste in all situations of life or in the presence of death. When I walked with him one day up the old duckboards under shell fire, he swung his trench stick with careless grace, made comical grimaces of contempt at the bursting shells, and said, “Gibbs, if we have to die, let’s do it like gentlemen! If we’re afraid (as we are!) let’s look extremely brave. A good pose is essential in life and war.”
At the soul of him he was a Bohemian and artist. His room, wherever we were, was littered with sketches, sheets of music, poems in manuscript, photographs of his portraits of beautiful ladies. Whatever the agony of the war around us, he loved to steal away alone or with one of his assistant officers, my humorous friend Theodore Holland (“little Theo” and “Theo the Flower,” as he called himself), well known as a composer, and play delightful little melodies from Bach and Gluck on an eighteenth-century flute.
In the early part of the war Lytton had served as a battalion officer in the trenches, with gallantry and distinction, and then was put in charge of a little group of French correspondents, whom he controlled with wonderful tact and good humor. He spoke French with the argot of Paris, and understood the French temperament and humor so perfectly that it was difficult to believe that he was not a Frenchman, when he was in the midst of his little crowd of excitable fellows who regarded him as a “bon garçon” and “un original” with such real affection that they were enraged when he was transferred to our command.
Another distinguished and unusual type of man—one of the greatest “intellectuals” of England, though unknown to the general public—joined us as assistant censor, halfway through the war. This was C. E. Montague, editor of The Manchester Guardian. At the outbreak of war he dyed his white hair black, enlisted as a “Tommy,” served in the trenches, reached the rank of sergeant, and finally was blown up in a dugout. When he joined us he had taken the dye out of his hair again and it was snow-white, though he was not more than fifty years of age.