I remember waking up in billets the morning after the night at the Chateau with the feeling that I had become extraordinarily rich.  I felt very humble, too, and very kindly towards all the world—­even to the Boche, though I can’t say I had ever hated him very wildly.  You find hate more among journalists and politicians at home than among fighting men.  I wanted to be quiet and alone to think, and since that was impossible I went about my work in a happy abstraction.  I tried not to look ahead, but only to live in the present, remembering that a war was on, and that there was desperate and dangerous business before me, and that my hopes hung on a slender thread.  Yet for all that I had sometimes to let my fancies go free, and revel in delicious dreams.

But there was one thought that always brought me back to hard ground, and that was Ivery.  I do not think I hated anybody in the world but him.  It was his relation to Mary that stung me.  He had the insolence with all his toad-like past to make love to that clean and radiant girl.  I felt that he and I stood as mortal antagonists, and the thought pleased me, for it helped me to put some honest detestation into my job.  Also I was going to win.  Twice I had failed, but the third time I should succeed.  It had been like ranging shots for a gun—­first short, second over, and I vowed that the third should be dead on the mark.

I was summoned to G.H.Q., where I had half an hour’s talk with the greatest British commander.  I can see yet his patient, kindly face and that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb.  He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was in the battle-line.  So contradictory is human nature, that talk made me wish for a moment to stay where I was.  I wanted to go on serving under that man.  I realized suddenly how much I loved my work, and when I got back to my quarters that night and saw my men swinging in from a route march I could have howled like a dog at leaving them.  Though I say it who shouldn’t, there wasn’t a better division in the Army.

One morning a few days later I picked up Mary in Amiens.  I always liked the place, for after the dirt of the Somme it was a comfort to go there for a bath and a square meal, and it had the noblest church that the hand of man ever built for God.  It was a clear morning when we started from the boulevard beside the railway station; and the air smelt of washed streets and fresh coffee, and women were going marketing and the little trams ran clanking by, just as in any other city far from the sound of guns.  There was very little khaki or horizon-blue about, and I remember thinking how completely Amiens had got out of the war-zone.  Two months later it was a different story.