“I am Bingley of the _Thames_, Mr. Routledge.” “I have both seen and heard of your work, and admired it, Mr. Bingley,” Routledge responded cordially. “It is good to know you.” “And I have heard of you, too,” Bingley replied, to the delight of the others. Routledge embraced several old friends, but to most he was known less in person than by reputation. He had a tendency to laugh at the Powers in the act of making war, a tendency to make the world see that war was a hang-over from the days when men ate their flesh hot from the kill, not from the fire. Veiled under all his work, and often expressed openly in a stinging line, was his conviction that war was a ghastly imposition upon the men in the ranks. This was considered by the rest as a mere mental dissipation of a truly great worker. A certain aloofness added to the mystery and enchantment of the man. In the field, he would attach himself to some far-ranging column out for dirty work, choosing his command from an intimate knowledge of the leader and the men; to which was added a conception of India, her topography, strategies, fighters, and her methods of thought and action which could hardly be paralleled--outside of the secret service--in any British mind. The _Review_ invariably kept a second man at the heart of things to cover the routine, so that Routledge could follow his inclinations for hard-riding and bring in his wondrous tales of far chances, night attacks, the enemy at first hand, the faces and valor of the few who hearkened to the swish of the Reaper, the scream from inert flesh as the spirit flees away--the humor, the horror, the hell of the clash. It is an axiom of the craft that in a platoon fighting for its life there is all the grip of human interest that appals in the collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts; and Routledge played the lesser game to the seeds. It was said of him that he could crawl into the soldier’s brain and watch the machinery falter in full blast and break down. Always you felt, as you read him, that he had a great pity for the ranker, and a great hate for the system that used him. Where the Terrible was involved, there was a jolting energy in the descriptive powers of Routledge. Even the type which bore his messages from the field to the streets of London seemed sometimes vivid, crackling characters snapped hot from the reeking centres of war. He could make his first lines stand out in the thick _Review_ columns like a desert sunset.