‘The New Officer is an Edison and a Trojan.
‘While I am proud of that glorious Old Army which I saw bleeding at Mons and expiring at Ypres, I do feel we must cease to talk of the old and concentrate on the new. The New Army is fighting to-day, and it is most discouraging to our latest cavalier to remind him continually of his temporary rank and temporary job.
‘That word “temporary” ought to be silenced for ever.
‘The New Officer has proved that leadership is no monopoly, and that warfare is not difficult to master. He has exploded the theory that it takes twenty years to make a colonel, and forty to make a general. He has shocked our drill-sergeants, and surprised our Napoleons by his ruthless destruction of shams and his nimble seizure of facts. He is the daring, dashing, dauntless Brigadier Gerard.
‘He is an optimist, and therefore successful.
‘If the New Officer owes a great deal to his predecessor, his predecessor must also acknowledge his debt. The sincerity, the enthusiasm, the intelligence, and the business ability of the new man have been priceless assets in this war. What would this Empire have done without the splendid fellow who chucked his wealth and his pleasures into the dust-heap, and came to us for a job? He was irrepressible! If his chest was small, he bribed men to slip him through. If his heart was diseased, it suddenly became cured. If varicose veins were in his legs, he had them cut out. If he was forty or fifty, he became twenty or thirty. And if he hadn’t experience, he always said, “I’ll d—— soon learn.”
‘He was a blood-thirsty crusader.
‘Now, when he joined we were mournful. We looked at him and sighed. “The correct thing,” somehow or other, wasn’t in his keeping. He was inclined to call the colonel “Alf” and the sergeant-major “Bill.” He didn’t know! And, oh dear—his word of command! It was so respectable—so tame! He seemed to apologise to the troops for his presence—yea, his very existence. Yet he was a sticker. He was cursed from dawn till sunset. In those early days he was occasionally insulted and abused. There was a war on, and we regarded him as shell-fodder, and not as human. Let us apologise now. We were worried. The Old Army was dying. The Huns were knocking at the gates, and we, with our old conservative ideas, regarded him as a forlorn hope, and sometimes as “a wash-out.”
‘How wrong, how terribly unjust, we were!