I am sustained, exalted by that sense of righteousness you feel when you
are insanely pounding somebody who thinks that in perfect sanity and
integrity he has pounded you.
[_Saturday, 3rd._]
Mr. L. asked me to breakfast. He has told me more about the Corps in
five minutes than the Corps has been able to tell me in as many days. He
has seen it at Alost and Termonde. You gather that he has seen other
heroic enterprises also and that he would perjure himself if he swore
that they were indispensable. Every Correspondent is besieged by the
leaders of heroic enterprises, and I imagine that Mr. L. has been "had"
before now by amateurs of the Red Cross, and his heart must have sunk
when he heard of an English Field Ambulance in Ghent. And he owns to
positive terror when he saw it, with its girls in breeches, its
Commandant in Norfolk jacket, grey knickerbockers, heather-mixture
stockings and deer-stalker; its Chaplain in khaki, and its Surgeon a
mark for bullets in his Belgian officer's cap. I suggest that this
absence of uniform only proves our passionate eagerness to be off and
get to work. But it is right. Our ambulance is the real thing, and Mr.
L. is going to be an angel and help it all he can. He will write about
it in the _Illustrated London News_ and the _Westminster_. When he hears
that I came out here to write about the War and make a little money for
the Field Ambulance, and that I haven't seen anything of the War and
that my invasion of his hotel is simply a last despairing effort to at
least hear something, he is more angelic than ever. He causes a whole
cinema of war-scenes to pass before my eyes. When I ask if there is
anything left for me to "do," he evokes a long procession of
articles--pure, virgin copy on which no journalist has ever laid his
hands--and assures me that it is mine, that the things that have been
done are nothing to the things that are left to do. I tell him that I
have no business on his pitch, and that I am horribly afraid of getting
in the regular Correspondents' way and spoiling their game; as I am
likely to play it, there isn't any pitch. Of course, I suppose, there is
the "scoop," but that's another matter. It is the War Correspondent's
crown of cunning and of valour, and nobody can take from him that
crown. But in the psychology of the thing, every Correspondent is his
own pitch. He has told me very nearly all the things I want to know,
among them what the Belgian General said to the Commandant when he saw
Ursula Dearmer at Alost:
"What the devil is the lady doing there?"
I gather that Mr. L. shares the General's wonder and my own anxiety. I
am not far wrong in regarding Alost and Termonde as no fit place for
Ursula Dearmer or any other woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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