It was a curious return. But for the fact that I was still in uniform I might have been a mere tourist, a spectator. The job was more “cushy” even than that of R.T.O. or M.L.O. Was I glad? Enormously. Was I sorry? Yes, for out there in the thick of it were those men of mine, in a sense my children, who had looked to me for the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the pay they drew, the punishments they received, whose lives had been in my keeping so long, who, for two years, had constituted all my life, with whom I had shared good days and bad, short rations and full, hardships innumerable, suffering indescribable. It was impossible to live softly and be driven in a big Vauxhall car, while they were still out there, without a twinge of conscience, even though one was not fit to go back to them. I slept in a bed with sheets, and now and again a hot bath, receiving letters from home in four days instead of eight, and generally enjoying all the creature comforts which console the back-area officer for the lack of excitement only found in the firing line. It was a period of doing little, observing much and thinking a great deal among those lucky ones of the earth, whose lines had been cast in peaceful waters far behind even the backwash of that cataclysmic tidal wave in which so many less fortunate millions had been sucked under. My first job was to accompany a party of French war correspondents to the occupied territory which the enemy had recently been forced to evacuate,--Dunkerque, Ostend, Bruges, Courtrai, Denain, Lille. There one marvelled at the courage of those citizens who for four years had had to bow the neck to the invader. From their own mouths we heard stories of the systematic, thought-out cruelty of the Germans who hurt not only the bodies of their victims, but their self-respect, their decency, their honour, their souls. How they survived that interminable hopeless four years of exaggerated brutality and pillage, cut off from all communication with the outside world; fed with stories of ghastly defeats inflicted upon their countrymen and allies, of distrust and revolt between England and France; fined and imprisoned for uncommitted offences against military law, not infrequently shot in cold blood without trial; their women submitted to the last indignities of the “_Inspection sanitaire_,” irrespective of age or class, wrenched from their homes and deported into the unknown interior, sent to work for the hated enemy behind the firing line, unprotected from the assault of any German soldier or officer,--for those women there were worse things than the firing trenches.