The illustrated papers continued to picture it as a sort of glorified picnic where smiling young men lolled luxuriously in cosy dug-outs, reading their favourite paper.

By curious coincidence, it generally happened to be the journal publishing the photograph.

Occasionally, it appeared, they came across the enemy, who then put up both hands and shouted "Kamerad." But the weary, wounded men she talked to told another story.
She grew impatient of the fighters with their mouths; the savage old baldheads heroically prepared to sacrifice the last young man; the sleek, purring women who talked childish nonsense about killing every man, woman and child in Germany, but quite meant it; the shrieking journalists who had decided that their place was the home front; the press-spurred mobs, the spy hunters, chasing terrified old men and sobbing children through the streets.

It was a relief to enter the quiet ward and close the door behind her.

The camp-followers: the traders and pedlars, the balladmongers, and the mountebanks, the ghoulish sightseers! War brought out all that was worst in them.