After a day of action, or after the chance has come to rest for a while after days of action, one gets a sense of the horror of the whole business--the tragedy of lives laid down, in a good cause certainly, but the men are dead, and one questions almost with despair if it is worth while. So many good men with whom one has joked and worked and played in time of peace have gone under--and there are probably more battles yet to fight. It is not until a war has concluded, and men who have served are able to get some idea of the operations as a whole, that they are able to understand what has been done and why it has been done. Men who came back wounded from Mons and Charleroi, away from the magnificent three weeks’ retreat that was then in progress for the British and French armies, were, in many cases, fully convinced that they had been defeated--that their armies were beaten, and had to retreat to save themselves from destruction. The man in the ranks cannot understand the plan of the staff who control him, for he sees so very little of the whole; at the most, he knows what is happening to a division of men, while engaged in the retreat to the position of the Marne were, at the least, twenty divisions on the side of the Allies. Had one of these been utterly shattered in a set battle, the other nineteen might still have won a decisive victory, and, if news of that victory had not come through for a day or two, the survivors from the shattered division would have spread tidings of a defeat--which it would have been, to them. The man in the ranks sees so little of the whole. Here the war correspondent makes the most egregious mistakes, for, untrained in military service himself, he takes the word of the man in the ranks--the man on the staff of army headquarters is far too busy and far too discreet to talk to war correspondents--and out of what the man in the ranks has to say the war correspondent makes up his story. Though the man in the ranks may believe his own story to be true, though he may tell of the operations as he conceives them, he may be giving an utterly false impression of what is actually happening. The man in the ranks is one cog in a machine, and he cannot tell what all the machine is doing at any time, least of all when a battle is in progress.