[Illustration: _Elliott & Fry phot._ MR. G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS.] WITH OUR ARMY IN FLANDERS CHAPTER I OF OUR ARMY IN THE FIELD All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world at peace and the world at war. Never were contrasts so marked as in this war. To cast the mind back a twelvemonth is like looking back on one’s early childhood. “This time last year!...” How often one hears the phrase out here, with recollections of last year’s glorious, golden Ascot, of distant, half-forgotten strife about Ulster, of a far rumbling, as yet indistinctly heard, in the Balkans, where swift and sudden death was preparing for that sinister Prince whose passing plunged the world into war. “This time last year ...”--City men use the phrase. _They_ were then the top-hatted strap-hangers of Suburbia, their thoughts divided between their business, their families, their hobbies. _Then_ the word _Territorial_ might raise a laugh at a music-hall; on Saturday afternoons soldiering was a pleasant relief from the office grind, and in summer afforded a healthful open-air holiday. London was full of Germans. We all knew Germans, and in our insular way toadied to the big fry and ridiculed the small, holding our state of military unpreparedness to be the finest tribute to our pacific aims, and making fun of the German, his steadfastness of purpose, his strict national discipline, his thrift. We welcomed at our tables the vanguard of the German army of invasion, the charming, salaried spies of the Embassy who made their way everywhere in that loose-tongued, light-thinking cosmopolitan crowd that in London passes for society, and the humbler secret agents, the waiters who in the trenches in Flanders are now turning their knowledge of our tongue to profitable account. We had German clerks, nice, well-spoken, cheap--cheap labour covers a multitude of sins!--hard-working young fellows who lived in boarding-houses at Brondesbury or Lancaster Gate, according to their means, and who, over their port after Sunday dinner, exchanged assurances with the “_dummen Engländern_” of the mutual esteem entertained by England and Germany for each other.