The Indian Civil Servant went for a stroll with me in the moonlight,
after a day up the line, where young men were living and dying in
dirty ditches. I could see that he was worried, even angry.

"Those people!" he said.

"What people?"

"G. H. Q."

"Oh, Lord!" I groaned. "Again?" and looked across the fields of corn
to the dark outline of a convent on the hill where young officers were
learning the gentle art of killing by machine-guns before their turn
came to be killed or crippled. I thought of a dead boy I had seen that
day--or yesterday was it?--kneeling on the fire-step of a trench, with
his forehead against the parapet as though in prayer. . . How sweet
was the scent of the clover to-night! And how that star twinkled above
the low flashes of gun-fire away there in the salient.

"They want us to waste your time," said the officer. "Those were the
very words used by the Chief of Intelligence--in writing which I have
kept. 'Waste their time!' . . . I'll be damned if I consider my work
is to waste the time of war correspondents. Don't those good fools see
that this is not a professional adventure, like their other little
wars; that the whole nation is in it, and that the nation demands to
know what its men are doing? They have a right to know."