Aunt. "So your father's going to be a soldier?"
Elder Boy. "Well, you see, one of us had to join."
FROM THE BACK OF THE FRONT.
Some people say that the authorities have at last come to understand our true merits; some people say that they have come to despair of us as private soldiers. Some even identify the two allegations. Howbeit, from whatsoever cause, certain of us are in imminent danger of losing our private status. We are assembled together by companies and instructed in the arts of inspecting water-bottles, telling the time on starless nights by radium-pointed watches, and in all practical and tactical usages that fall to the lot of a platoon-commander. In due course we shall pass out and take the war into our own hands; pending which we meditate on our future responsibilities. Private Ingleby lives abstracted days wondering whether a machine-gun officer may without offence wear puce-coloured riding-breeches, while Edward spends sleepless nights theorising on his procedure if unexpectedly put in charge of a brigade.
Our course of training is rapid and comprehensive; nor are we vowed only to destruction. We think nothing, for instance, of building a bridge between breakfast and lunch, though of course we'd think a whole heap before treading on it. We are here to risk our lives, but not to throw them upon the waters.
No secret of military art is hidden from us; not one of us but can conduct a grand attack on his little own, and that without losing as much as a platoon. Watch General Private Williamson exercising his brief authority over his skeleton battalion. We arrive at the kick-off site. The General halts us, breaks us off, and begins his preliminary reconnaissance. In the far distance loom the twin flags representing enemy's position—an indication, we regret to report, frequently neglected by the Bosches. A lesser man than Private Williamson might immediately plump forward line upon line of extended platoons. Pas si vite. What is the first question our General asks himself—or anyone else present? He enquires the whereabouts of the nearest estaminet. Seated over his coffee he conducts, with the assistance of his staff (the attacking force), the preliminary reconnaissance. First of all we touch lightly on the proximity of the enemy. The General puts it at 2,000 yards; the chief of staff at 800. That makes it, by a simple mathematical compromise, 1,400; which gives you your range chart, without which no attack is quite itself.
But the work of the General does not end here. The land must be spied out; the country which we are—for some obscure reason—fighting for is one-half lake and one-half swamp. Accordingly, as the attack has to have clean boots on parade next day, scouts go forward to select the most land-like portions of the morass. Then at last we advance, and with only an occasional halt for coffee—this depending on the number of farms en route—we sweep on to the rallying position, where we sit down nonchalantly in a hail of bullets and discuss a haversack ration while a real officer tells us how. His telling is competence itself, except in one respect;
