CHAPTER II.
THE DEFENSIVE BATTLE OF LAST SPRING I.
_March, 1919._ Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there are naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief.

I have just described one of them.

But I look back to others not less vivid--an evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north and south of the Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great building at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the German Army Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Prefecture; the eastern battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel, through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mezieres; General Pershing in his office, and General Pershing _en petit comite_ in a friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure, with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished rooms in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, where the British General Staff worked during the war, when it was not moving in its staff train up and down behind the front.
But I do not intend to make these letters a mere _omnium gatherum_ of recollections.

All through, my object has been to lay hold of the main outline of what has happened on the Western front during the past eleven months, and if I could, to make them clear to other civilians, men and women, as clearly and rapidly as possible, in this interval between the regime of _communiques_ and war-correspondence under which we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now either writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war.
Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of the great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed.
There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare which were to have been launched upon the enemy had the war continued, are naturally not for the public for a good while ahead.

And considering that, year by year, we are still discussing and investigating the battles of a hundred years ago--( look for instance at the lists of recent books on the Napoleonic campaigns in the Cambridge Moddern History!)--we may guess at the time mankind will take hereafter in writing about and elucidating a war, where in many of the great actions, as a Staff Officer remarked to me, a Waterloo might have been lost without being missed, or won without being more than a favourable incident in an otherwise perhaps unfavourable whole.
At the same time, this generation has got somehow--as an ingredient in its daily life--to form as clear a mental picture as it can of the war as a whole, and especially just now of its closing months in France.