“I believe the Staff never hears a bullet whistle or sees a shell burst except through a telescope.
“I believe the Staff exists solely to find soft jobs for the wealthy and useless portion of the aristocracy.
“I believe the Staff does nothing except wear a supercilious manner and red tabs and trimmings.
“I believe the Staff is No Good.”
As to the average of correctness in this Credo I say nothing, but I can at least show that these things are not always thus.
The Staff had been having what the General’s youthful and irrepressibly cheerful aide-de-camp called “a hectic three days.” The Headquarters signallers had been going hard night and day until one of them was driven to remark bitterly as he straightened his bent back from over his instrument and waggled his stiffened fingers that had been tapping the “buzzer” for hours on end, “I’m developin’ a permanent hump on my back like a dog scrapin’ a pot, an’ if my fingers isn’t to be wore off by inches I’ll have to get the farrier to put a set of shoes on ’em.” But the signallers had some advantages that the Staff hadn’t, and one was that they could arrange spells of duty and at least have a certain time off for rest and sleep. The Staff Captain would have given a good deal for that privilege by about the third night. The worst of his job was that he had no time when he could be sure of a clear ten minutes’ rest. He had messages brought to him as he devoured scratch meals; he was roused from such short sleeps as he could snatch lying fully dressed on a camp bed, by telephone and telegraph messages, or, still worse, by horrible scrawls badly written in faint pencillings that his weary eyes could barely decipher as he sat up on his bed with a pocket electric glaring on the paper; once he even had to abandon an attempt to shave, wipe the lather from his face, and hustle to impart some information to a waiting General. A very hot fight was raging along that portion of front, and almost every report from the firing line contained many map references which necessitated so many huntings of obscure points on the maps that the mere reading and understanding of a message might take a full five or ten minutes; and in the same way the finding of regiments’ positions for the General’s information or the sending of orders added ten-fold to the map-hunting.
The third day was about the most “hectic” of all. For the Captain it began before daybreak with a call to the telephone which came just two hours after he had shuffled and shaken together the papers he had been working on without a break through the night, pulled off his boots, blown out his lamp, and dropped with a sigh of relief on his bed in a corner of the room. It was an urgent and personal call, and the first dozen words effectually drove the lingering sleep from the Captain’s eyes and brain. “Yes, yes, ‘heavily attacked,’ I got that; go on ... no, I don’t think I need to refer to the map; I very nearly know the beastly thing by heart now ... yes ... yes ... Who? ... killed outright ... that’s bad.... Who’s in command now then ... right. The Dee and Don Trenches—wait a minute, which are they? Oh yes, I remember, south from the Pigsty and across to Stink Farm ... right. I’ll pass it on at once and let you know in five minutes ... just repeat map references so I can make a note ... yes ... yes ... yes
... right ... ’Bye.”
The urgency of the message, which told of a heavy and partially successful attack on the Divisional Front, wiped out any hope the Captain might have had of a return to his broken sleep. For the next two hours his mind was kept at full stretch reducing to elaborated details the comprehensive commands of the General, locating reserves and supports and Battalion H.Q.s, exchanging long messages with the Artillery, collecting figures of ammunition states, available strengths, casualty returns, collating and sifting them out, reshuffling them and offering them up to the Brigade Major or the General, absorbing or distributing messages from and to concrete personalities or nebulous authorities known widely if vaguely as the D.A.A.G., D.A.Q.M.G., D.A.D.O.S., A.D.M.S., C.D.S., and T., and other strings of jumbled initials.
He washed in the sparing dimensions of a canvas wash-stand, Field Service, x Pattern, deliberately taking off his coat and rolling up his shirt-sleeves, and firmly turning a deaf and soap-filled ear to the orderly who placed a ruled telephone message form on his table and announced it urgent. Afterwards he attended to the message, and talked into the telephone while his servant cleared one side of his table and served plentiful bacon, and eggs of an unknown period. Immediately after this a concentrated bombardment suddenly developed on a ruined château some three or four hundred yards from the H.Q. farm. To the youthful aide-de-camp who had arrived from the outer dampness dripping water from every angle of a streaming mackintosh he remarked wrathfully on the prospect of having to move once again in the middle of such beastly waterfall weather. The aide stood at the brown-paper patched window, chuckling and watching the shells rewreck the already wrecked château. “Looks as if their spies had sold ’em a pup this time,” he said gleefully. “I believe they must have been told we were in that old ruin instead of here. Or they were told this place and mistook it on the map for the château. Rather a lark—what!”
“Confound the larks,” said the Captain bitterly, “especially if they come any nearer this way. This place is quite leaky and draughty enough now without it getting any more shrap or splinter holes punched in it.”