But I do not intend to make these letters a mere _omnium gatherum_ of recollections. All through, my object has been to lay hold of the main outline of what has happened on the Western front during the past eleven months, and if I could, to make them clear to other civilians, men and women, as clearly and rapidly as possible, in this interval between the régime of _communiqués_ and war-correspondence under which we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now either writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war. Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of the great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed. There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare which were to have been launched upon the enemy had the war continued, are naturally not for the public for a good while ahead. And considering that, year by year, we are still discussing and investigating the battles of a hundred years ago--(look for instance at the lists of recent books on the Napoleonic campaigns in the Cambridge Moddern History!)--we may guess at the time mankind will take hereafter in writing about and elucidating a war, where in many of the great actions, as a Staff Officer remarked to me, a Waterloo might have been lost without being missed, or won without being more than a favourable incident in an otherwise perhaps unfavourable whole.