Now it can be Told by Philip Gibbs — Read

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 château 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. " On my way back from the salient one evening I walked up the drive in the flickering light of summer eve, and saw two officers coming in my direction, one of whom I thought I recognized as an old friend.

"Hullo! " I said, cheerily. "You here again?"