The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army’s work; the itinerants of the road of war.  Nobody sees so much as we, because we have nothing to do but to see.  An officer looking at the towers of Ypres Cathedral a mile away from the trench where he was, said:  “No, I’ve never been in Ypres.  Our regiment has not been stationed in that part of the line.”

We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of Ypres with an archaeologist’s eye; we know the names of the estaminets of the villages, from “The Good Farmer” to “The Harvester’s Rest” and “The Good Cousin,” not to mention “The Omnibus Stop” on the Cassel Hill.  Madame who keeps the hotel in the G.H.Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a ribbon of saltwater but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too, between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death.

G.H.Q. means General Headquarters and B.E.F., which shows the way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force.  The high leading, the brains of the army, are theoretically at G.H.Q.  That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other points.  An officer sent from G.H.Q. to command a brigade had not been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows at G.H.Q.  When he was at G.H.Q. he used to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front.  The philosophers of G.H.Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army smiled—­it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office and the branches.  But the line did the most smiling to see the new brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.

G.H.Q. directs the whole; here every department of all that vast concern which supplies the hundreds of thousands of men and prepares for the other hundreds of thousands is focussed.  The symbol of its authority is a red band round the cap, which means that you are a staff officer.  No war at G.H.Q., only the driving force of war.  It seems as far removed from the front as the New York office of a string of manufacturing plants.

If one follows a red-banded cap into a door he sees other officers and clerks and typewriters, and a sign which says that a department chief has his desk in the drawing-room of a private house—­where he has had it for months.  Go to one mess and you will hear talk about garbage pails and how to kill flies; to another, about hospitals and clearing stations for the wounded; to another, about barbed