d first known at Uskub in
Macedonia in the days of the Macedonian revolution, when Hilmi Pasha was
juggling with the Powers of Europe and autonomy--days which seem far
away. A lieutenant then, Howell had an assignment from _The Times_,
while home on leave from India, in order to make a study of the Balkan
situation. In our walks around Uskub as we discussed the politics and
the armies of the world I found that all was grist that came to his keen
mind. His ideas about soldiering were explicit and practical. It was
such hard-working, observant officers as he, most of them students at
one time or another at the Staff College, who, when the crisis came, as
the result of their application in peace time, became the organizers and
commanders of the New Army. The lieutenant I had met at Uskub was now,
at thirty-eight, the director of the tactics of an army corps which was
solving the problem of reducing the most redoubtable of field works.

Whenever I think of the Staff College I am reminded that at the close of
the American Civil War the commanders of all the armies and most of the
corps were graduates of West Point, which serves to prove that a man of
ability with a good military education has the start of one who has not,
though no laws govern geniuses; and if we should ever have to fight
another great war I look for our generals to have studied at Leavenworth
and when the war ends for the leaders to be men whom the public did not
know when it began.

"We shall have another show to-morrow and I think that will be a good
one, too," said Howell.

All attacks are "shows;" big shows over two or three miles or more of
front, little shows over a thousand yards or so, while five hundred
yards is merely "cleaning up a trench." It may seem a flippant way of
speaking, but it is simply the application of jargon to the everyday
work of an organization. An attack that fails is a "washout," for not
all attacks succeed. If they did, progress would be a matter of
marching.

"Zero is at four; come at two," Howell said when I was going.

At two the next afternoon I found him occupied less with final details
than with the routine business of one who is clearing his desk
preparatory to a week-end holiday. Against the wall of what had been
once a bedroom in the house of the leading citizen of the town, which
was his office, he had an improvised bookkeeper's desk and on it were
the mapped plans of the afternoon's operation, which he had work