Chesterton kissed her quickly.

"What happens then," he said, "doesn't matter."

The war game had run its happy-go-lucky course briefly and brilliantly,
with "glory enough for all," even for Chesterton. For, in no previous
campaign had good fortune so persistently stood smiling at his elbow. At
each moment of the war that was critical, picturesque, dramatic, by some
lucky accident he found himself among those present. He could not lose.
Even when his press boat broke down at Cardenas, a Yankee cruiser and
two Spanish gun-boats, apparently for his sole benefit, engaged in an
impromptu duel within range of his megaphone. When his horse went lame,
the column with which he had wished to advance, passed forward to the
front unmolested, while the rear guard, to which he had been forced to
join his fortune, fought its way through the stifling underbrush.

Between his news despatches, when he was not singing the praises of
his fellow-countrymen, or copying lists of their killed and wounded, he
wrote to Miss Armitage. His letters were scrawled on yellow copy
paper and consisted of repetitions of the three words, "I love you,"
rearranged, illuminated, and intensified.

Each letter began much in the same way. "The war is still going on. You
can read about it in the papers. What I want you to know is that I love
you as no man ever--" And so on for many pages.

From her only one of the letters she wrote reached him. It was picked up
in the sand at Siboney after the medical corps, in an effort to wipe out
the yellow-fever, had set fire to the post-office tent.