And he wonders what became of this precocious
infant, and whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the
hand of the sister of the sporting editor in marriage.
To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of
writers, but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance
of the truth to situations that in human experience could
hardly exist. The same quality that showed in his tales made
him the most readable of war correspondents. He went to all
the wars of his youth and middle age filled with visions of
glorious action. Where other correspondents saw and reported
evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable suffering,
blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject with
a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a
headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance,
and then filled in the story with human details, so that the
reader came away with an impression that all these heroic
deeds were performed by people just like the reader himself,
which was exactly the truth.
It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers
and the stupidity of the French and English prevented him from
seeing the actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene
is an ugly one, a wallow of blood and mire.
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