Officers and men alike are invariably ready and willing to voice their gratitude and their everlasting appreciation of the help and comfort provided by those who are attached to lay organisations having for the time being a more or less military complexion; they are equally ready to score the incompetents who infrequently turn up in these auxiliary branches of the service. A man who is fighting Fritz is apt to have a short temper anyhow, and meddlesome busybodies who want to aid without knowing any of the rudiments make him see red and swear blue.
A general of division told me that when he moved in with his command to the sector which he then was occupying he was tagged by an undoubtedly earnest but undeniably pestiferous person who wanted everything else suspended until his purposes in accompanying the expedition had been satisfied.
“I was a fairly busy person along about then,” said the general. “We were within reach of the enemy's big guns and his aëroplanes were giving us considerable bother, and what with getting a sufficiency of dugouts and trench shelters provided for the troops and attending to about a million other things of more or less importance from a military standpoint I had mighty little time to spare for side issues; and my officers had less.
“But the person I am speaking of kept after me constantly. His idea was that the men needed recreation and needed it forthwith. He was there to provide this recreation without delay, and he couldn't understand why there should be any delay in attending to his wishes.
“Finally, to get rid of him, I gave orders that a noncommissioned officer and a squad of men should be taken away from whatever else they were doing and told off to aid our self-appointed amusement director in doing whatever it was he wanted done. It was the only way short of putting him under arrest that would relieve me of a common nuisance and leave my staff free to do their jobs.
“Well, it seemed that the young man had brought along with him a tent and a moving-picture outfit and a supply of knockdown seats. Under his direction the detail of men set up the tent on an open site which he selected upon the very top of a little hill, where it stood out against the sky line like a target; which, in a way of speaking, was exactly what it was. Then he installed his moving-picture machine and ranged his chairs in rows and announced that that evening there would be a free show. I may add that I knew nothing of this at the time, and inasmuch as the recreation man was known to be acting by my authority with a free hand no officer felt called upon to interfere, I suppose.
“The show started promptly on time, with a large and enthusiastic audience of enlisted men on hand and with the tent all lit up inside. In the midst of the darkness roundabout it must have loomed up like a lighthouse. Naturally there were immediate consequences.
“Before the first reel was halfway unrolled a boche flying man came sailing over, with the notion of making us unhappy in our underground shelters if he could. He found a shining mark waiting for him, so dropped a bomb at that tent. Luckily the bomb missed the tent, but it struck alongside of it and the concussion blew the canvas flat. The men came out from under the flattened folds and stampeded for the dugouts, wrecking the moving-picture machine in their flight. And the next day we were shy one amusement director. He had gone away from there.”
In the Army itself there are exceedingly few members of the Bejones of Tuxedo family, and this, I take it, is a striking evidence of the average high intelligence of the men who have been chosen to officer our forces, considering that we started at scratch to mould millions of civilians into soldiers and considering also how necessary it was at the outset to issue a great number of commissions overnight, as it were. Howsomever, now and again a curious ornithological specimen does bob up, wearing shoulder straps.
A party of civilians, observers, were sent to France by a friendly power to have a look at our troops. When they reached General Headquarters they were being escorted by a beardless youth with the bars of a second lieutenant on his coat. He also wore two bracelets, one of gold and one of silver, on his right wrist. He also spoke with a fascinating lisp. He went straight to the office of the officer commanding the Intelligence Section.