with it--with what we have--as what we
are."

The young staff officer nodded. He thought that was "about it."

"You've got no sons," said Mr. Britling.

"I'm not even married," said Raeburn, as though he thanked God.

The little well-informed lady remarked abruptly that she had two sons;
one was just home wounded from Suvla Bay. What her son told her made her
feel very grave. She said that the public was still quite in the dark
about the battle of Anafarta. It had been a hideous muddle, and we had
been badly beaten. The staff work had been awful. Nothing joined up,
nothing was on the spot and in time. The water supply, for example, had
gone wrong; the men had been mad with thirst. One regiment which she
named had not been supported by another; when at last the first came
back the two battalions fought in the trenches regardless of the enemy.
There had been no leading, no correlation, no plan. Some of the guns,
she declared, had been left behind in Egypt. Some of the train was
untraceable to this day. It was mislaid somewhere in the Levant. At the
beginning Sir Ian Hamilton had not even been present. He had failed to
get there in time. It had been the reckless throwing away of an army.
And so hopeful an army! Her son declared it meant the complete failure
of the Dardanelles project....

"And when one hears how near we came to victory!" she cried, and left it
at that.

"Three times this year," said Raeburn, "we have missed victories because
of the badness of our staff work. It's no good picking out scapegoats.
It's a question of national habit. It's because the sort of man we turn
out from our public schools has never learnt how to catch trains, get to
an office on the minute, pack a knapsack properly, or do anything
smartly and quickly--anything whatever that he can possibly get done for
him. You can't expect men who are habitually easy-going to keep bucked
up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of time. All their
training is against it. All their tradition. They hate being prigs. An
Englishman will be any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig.
That's why we've lost three good fights that we ought to have won--and
thousands and thousands of men--and material and time, precious beyond
reckoning. We've lost a year. We've dashed the spirit of our people."

"My boy in Flanders," said Mr. Britling, "says about the same thing. He
says our officers have never learnt to count beyond ten, and that they