It was absurd for Montague to be censoring our dispatches, ordering our cars, looking after our mess, soothing our way with headquarter staffs, accompanying us as a silent observer to battlefields and trenches and “pill-boxes” and dugouts. He could have written any man of us “off our heads.” He would have been the greatest war correspondent in the world. He writes such perfect prose that every sentence should be carved in marble or engraved on bronze. He had the eye of a hawk for small detail, and a most sensitive perception of truth and beauty lying deep below the surface of our human scene. Compared with Montague our censor—hating his job, deeply contemptuous of our work, loathing the futility of all but the fighting men, with a secret revolt in his soul against the whole bloody business of war, yet with a cold white passion of patriotism (though Irish)—we were pigmies, vulgarians, and shameless souls. His bitterness has been revealed in a book called Disenchantment—very cruel to us, rather unfair to me, as he admits in a letter I have, but wonderful in its truth.
There was one other man who joined our organization as one of the censors, to whom I must pay a tribute of affection and esteem. This was a young fellow named Cadge, unknown to fame, always silent and sulky in his manner, but with a level head, a genius for doing exactly the right thing at the right time, and a secret sweetness and nobility of soul which kept our little “show” running on greased wheels and made him my good comrade in many adventures. Scores of time he and I went together into the dirty places, into the midst of the muck and ruin of war, across the fields where shells came whining, along the trenches where masses of men lived in the mud, under the menace of death.
A strange life—like a distant dream now!—but made tolerable at times, because of these men whose portraits I have sketched, and whose friendship was good to have.
XX
The four and a half years of war were, of course, to me, as to all men who passed through that time, the most stupendous experience of life. It obliterated all other adventures, impressions, and achievements. I went into the war youthful in ideas and sentiment. I came out of it old in the knowledge of human courage and endurance and suffering by masses of men, and utterly changed, physically and mentally. Romance had given way to realism, sentiment of a weak kind to deeper knowledge and pity and emotion.
Our life as war correspondents was not to be compared for a moment in hardness and danger and discomfort to that of the fighting men in the trenches. Yet it was not easy nor soft, and it put a tremendous, and sometimes almost intolerable, strain upon our nerves and strength, especially if we were sensitive, as most of us were, to the constant sight of wounded and dying men, to the never-ending slaughter of our country’s youth, to the grim horror of preparations for battle which we knew would cause another river of blood to flow, and to the desolation of that world of ruin through which we passed day by day, on the battlefields and in the rubbish heaps which had once been towns and villages.
We saw, more than most men the wide sweep of the drama of war on the Western front. The private soldier and the battalion officer saw the particular spot which he had to defend, knew in his body and soul the intimate detail of his trench, his dugout, the patch of No-Man’s Land beyond his parapet, the stink and filth of his own neighborhood with death, the agony of his wounded pals. But we saw the war in a broader vision, on all parts of the front, in its tremendous mass effects, as well as in particular places of abomination. Before battle we saw the whole organization of that great machine of slaughter. After battle we saw the fields of dead, the spate of wounded men, the swirling traffic of ambulances, the crowded hospitals, the herds of prisoners, the length and breadth of this frightful melodrama in a battle zone forty miles or more in length and twenty miles or more in depth.
The effect of such a vision, year in, year out, can hardly be calculated in psychological effect, unless a man has a mind like a sieve and a soul like a sink.