“G.H.Q.”
There is a certain magic in initial letters, and they seem to be most magical when they run in trinities. Who has not heard of the G.O.M. and B.M.G and A.B.C. and G.B.S. and that R.I.P. which has a richer gloom than even Raleigh’s forlorn Hic Jacet? But in this war the greatest of all is G.H.Q.
G.H.Q. stands for General Headquarters, known to most newspaper readers as the place where the telegrams come from to depress or to cheer us. But they have a great deal more to do at G.H.Q. than merely to receive messages from the fighting front, and to send them home. Having had the privilege of paying a visit there within the last ten days, I can realise that fact with the vivid actuality of a thing seen. If the Commander-in-Chief and his General Staff are the brain of an army, cerebellum and cerebrum, G.H.Q. supplies its nervous and motor system. Nerves, efferent and afferent, carrying in thrills of sensation and carrying out waves of movement to the extreme limits of the military organism, muscles in association with the nerves—these make up G.H.Q.
Let me detail some of its activities.
When you export an army you have got to export with it a government. Our army in France is to all intents and purposes a colony in arms, with a purely male population larger than the total population of New Zealand. G.H.Q. is at once its Westminster and its War Office; its railway—from booking-office to clearing-house—and its Bank; its Scotland Yard and its Harley Street; its tinker, tailor, butcher, baker and candlestick-maker.
In Pantheistic philosophies all things issue from a central principle, and all return to it. G.H.Q. is the Om of the East, the Absolute of that cloudy rhetorician from Berlin whom we used to call a philosopher, Hegel. Without G.H.Q. nothing; with G.H.Q. everything.
It is not a bad description of war to say that it consists in carrying heavy things from one place to another, and that victory depends on carrying them faster and more efficiently than the enemy. The heavy things may be soldiers, rifles, bully beef, howitzers, cartridges, hospital appliances, shells, or a score of other things indispensable. That is the reason why the first aspect of war that impresses one is transportation. From London to the front there is a line of troop trains, transports and convoys, linked together very nigh as closely as the boats in a pontoon bridge. Behind the whole of the front every road, railway and canal is scheduled.
On any road traffic must proceed in only one prescribed direction. If by any mischance you find yourself heading the other way, the first military policeman will very abruptly let you know all about it.
A line, at once elastic and unbreakable, carries our resolve from the centre of formation here to the point of contact in the trenches. It goes ohne Hast and ohne Rast, to borrow Teutonisms that were once more popular than they are likely ever to be again. No hurry, but no intermission of effort, that is the motto and practice of G.H.Q. The picturesque, bloody and heroic phases of war are praised everywhere and fire the imagination. But consider to yourself how our army would get on without its Carter Paterson! Its Carter Paterson is G.H.Q.