Ah, friend—had this indubitable fact
Haply occurred to poor Leonidas
How had he turned tail on Thermopulai!
It cannot be that even his few wits
Were addled to the point that, so advised,
Preposterous he had answered—"Cakes are prime,
Hearth-sides are snug, sleek dancing-girls have worth,
And yet for country's sake, to save our gods
Their temples, save our ancestors their tombs,
Save wife and child and home and liberty,—I
would chew sliced-salt-fish, bear snow—nay, starve
If need were—and by much prefer the choice!"
After dinner the routine was to go and look at the map before settling down again to work. Military Intelligence, in one of its rooms, kept up-to-date hour-by-hour a map of the fighting front, and after dinner we would crowd to this room to see the latest official news put up on the map and to hear the latest unofficial stories which embroidered the news. One evening, as a great advance on our part was marked up on the map, the clerk, moving the flag-pins, announced:
"They say the enemy cleared out so quickly that they left the hospitals behind, and the Australian corps has captured 50 German nurses. They report that they are looking well after them."
A titter went round the group of officers. It happened to be the night after the story had circulated—a story which President Wilson has since adopted among his family of anecdotes—that the Australians, having the Americans to co-operate with, had had to remonstrate with them for their undue rudeness to the Germans. The Australians had a reputation for being quite direct enough in their method of teaching the Boche not to be a Boche.
The titter, perhaps, had an injurious inference to some ears, for a General officer remarked, a little sternly:
"Gentlemen, the Australians are a gallant race. The German—er—ladies will be quite safe with them."
So, of course, it proved. It was fiction that any Colonial troops showed an undue sternness to prisoners. The average German knew that he was quite safe in the hands of any British unit—whether it was from Australia, Canada, or the Motherland.
The after-dinner peep at the map was a great finish to dinner. When the Armistice was signed officers were disconsolate for the loss of their ten minutes in the M.I. room. "I miss," said one, "our pleasant daily habit of advancing ten kilomètres on a front of fifty kilomètres."
No, life at G.H.Q. was sober and strenuous, but it was not dull or tedious. If a man has good work to do, lovely aspects of Nature to look upon, interesting company at his meals, he has all the real essentials of contentment; well, most of them.