nversation I remember (having taken notes of
it before I turned in that night). It was a remarkable conversation,
summing up many things of the same kind which I had heard in stray
sentences by other officers, and month by month, years afterward, heard
again, spoken with passion. This officer who had come out to France in
1914 and had been fighting ever since by a luck which had spared his
life when so many of his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak
with passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He said that G.H.Q.
was a close corporation in the hands of the military clique who had
muddled through the South African War, and were now going to muddle
through a worse one. They were, he said, intrenched behind impregnable
barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red tape, and caste privilege.
They were, of course, patriots who believed that the Empire depended
upon their system. They had no doubt of their inherent right to conduct
the war, which was "their war," without interference or criticism or
publicity. They spent many hours of the days and nights in writing
letters to one another, and those who wrote most letters received most
decorations, and felt, with a patriotic fire within their breasts, that
they were getting on with the war.

Within their close corporation there were rivalries, intrigues,
perjuries, and treacheries like those of a medieval court. Each general
and staff-officer had his followers and his sycophants, who jostled for
one another's jobs, fawned on the great man, flattered his vanity, and
made him believe in his omniscience. Among the General Staff there were
various grades--G.S.O. I, G.S.O. II, G.S.O. III, and those in the lower
grades fought for a higher grade with every kind of artfulness, and
diplomacy and back-stair influence. They worked late into the night.
That is to say, they went back to their offices after dining at
mess--"so frightfully busy, you know, old man!"--and kept their lights
burning, and smoked more cigarettes, and rang one another up on the
telephone with futile questions, and invented new ways of preventing
something from being down somewhere. The war to them was a far-off
thing essential to their way of life, as miners in the coal-fields are
essential to statesmen in Downing Street, especially in cold weather.
But it did not touch their souls or their bodies. They did not see its
agony, or imagine it, or worry about it. They were always cheerful,
breezy, brig