There was not much time for packing up, and only one motor-car, and only one rifle. The general said he would look after the rifle, but Colonel Childs said if that were so he would rather stay behind and take his chance of being captured. It would be safer for him. So the adjutant-general, the judge advocate, the deputy assistant judge advocate (Colonel Childs), and an orderly or two packed into the car and set out to find G.H.Q. Before they found it they had to run the gantlet of Germans, and were sniped all the way through a wood, and took flying shots at moving figures. Then, miles away, they found G.H.Q. “And weren't they sorry to see me again!” said General Macready, who told me the tale. “They thought they had lost me forever.” The day's casualty list was brought into the adjutant--general one evening when I was dining in his mess. The orderly put it down by the side of his plate, and he interrupted a funny story to glance down the columns of names. “Du Maurier has been killed... I'm sorry.” He put down the paper beside his plate again and continued his story, and we all laughed heartily at the end of the anecdote. It was the only way, and the soldier's way. There was no hugging of grief when our best friend fell. A sigh, another ghost in one's life, and then, “Carry on!” XVIII 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 chateau 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?” Then I saw that I was face to face with Sir Henry Rawlinson. He must have been surprised, but dug me in the ribs in a genial way, and said, “Hullo, young feller!” He made no further attempt to “pinch” our quarters, but my familiar method of address could not have produced that result.