And Mitchell answered--
"The details bring it home to us and make us see red."
And I replied to Mitchell--
"What the dickens d'you want to see red for?"
And he said--
"Everybody ought to at a time like this."
Of course, with such ignorance you can't argue, any more than you could with Rice, when he swore that he'd give up his home and family gladly in exchange for the heavenly joy of putting a bayonet through a German officer. It wasn't the spirit of war, and I told him so, and he called me "von Travers," and said that as I was going to be a soldier, he hoped, for the sake of the United Kingdom in general, there would be no war while I was in command of anybody.
Gradually there got to be a bit of feeling in the air, and we gave out that we stood for tactics and strategy and brain-power, and Rice and his lot gave out that they stood for hacking their way through. And as for strategy, they had the cheek to say that, if it came to actual battle, the Fourth would back its strategy against the Sixth every time. It was a sort of challenge, in fact, and rested chiefly on their complete ignorance of what strategy really meant.
When I asked Mitchell who were the strategists of the Fourth, he gave it away by saying--
"Me and Pegram."