G.H.Q. has got to see that things are carried, and it sees that they are. The foolish French Minister of War told a misled nation in 1870 that there was not a button missing from the gaiter of a soldier. That boast, so mad and disastrous, is to-day for our Expeditionary Force the “frigid and calculated” truth. The soldiers say to you all over the lines: “Anything you send arrives. Nothing goes wrong.” There are many others to praise as well as the Olympians of G.H.Q.—the chauffeur mending his tyre with lyrical profanity faute de mieux, the mechanic sweating behind the scenes at Boulogne or Calais, Mr. Tennant, Lord Kitchener—but, without G.H.Q. nothing.
They clothe themselves with all varieties of function. There is the A.G. (Adjutant-General), who does everything, and, when he gets tired, does something else for a change. There is the I.O. (Intelligence Officer), who sees that every visitor is passed through an infinite succession of sieves, lest he should prove to be a spy. There is the Provost-Marshal, the Chairman of the Prison Commissioners of the Battlefield. There is the Chief Engineer. There is the R.A.M.C. There is the Casualty Clearing Station. There is the Field Cashier. There is the R.T.O. (Railway Transportation Officer), who, if he does not like the look of you, sets you emulating Puck in the rapidity of your return. There is... What is there not?
G.H.Q. is an army, a government, an administration, a literature. You see those who wield its sceptre going about a French provincial town, yawning down deserted boulevards strewn with the debris of autumn, smoking in bare French rooms with green jalousies, always unperturbed, always efficient, always courteous, generally bored. You see them walking arm-in-arm, or in the saddle, knee to knee, with French staff officers, maintaining and deepening the Alliance. Some of them have tunics beribboned with the record of five campaigns; some are raw boys; but, all together, they keep the fight going. They are the Business Organisers of the war.
Now that the news of our advance is coming hotly in, they will praise bullets and bayonets. Mike O’Leary’s and General Fochs; but when one comes to think of it, it is hard on G.H.Q. that the patient, continuous infallibility which had not yet left a section, or even an individual soldier, short of bread, beef, cartridges or medical care should be left out of the picture.
“ZUR ERINNERUNG”
A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT
In Unconquered France
My dear Franz,
That was the familiar device you wrote in the book you gave me when twelve years ago we drank our final Bruderschaft at Innsbruck station. I was saying good-bye to your Alpenrose, your Rose of the Alps, where the great mountains spring up their ten and fourteen thousand feet out of the very pavements, where the Golden Roof glitters over its antique arcades, where the great bronze warriors guard the sleep of your Emperor Max, where Andreas Hofer fought the good fight against an imperial tyrant, where inns, old before the French Revolution, all but touch gables across the narrow, immemorial gassen. You wanted me to remember all that, but most of all, I think, you wanted me to remember the quiet valleys, full of colour and peace, the red cupolaed churches where we went to Mass at four o’clock of a Sunday morning, the mountains we conquered together, with their summit air that we thought better than wine, until we came back, leg-weary if heart-high, in the evening to drink your thin country vintage, and applaud the zither-players and the amazing Tyrolese dancers. When I was last in your Tyrol I did not see you, Franz: you had gone to Berlin to study philology, that characteristic pseudo-science which Nietzsche and your Prussians have transformed into a seed-bed of criminal philosophies.
Those good days of our youth are worse than dead, a rivulet lost in the salt sea of estrangement that has engulfed so many friendships and so much happiness. We have other things to remember. Two years ago your Austria drove a sword into the heart of Europe. The agony of simple men then initiated still continues. I wonder where that damnable, recurrent date found you this midsummer? Fighting against that Italia irredenta with which you used to sympathise so generously? Falling back before that Russia which you used to agree with me in regarding as the chosen home of great novels and profound religion? In the lines against France, that France which shaped and nourished the soul of every free soul in Teutondom—and they have not been many—from Heine to your own tragic Empress? There is another possibility which I had almost forgotten. No Man’s Land, or, as one had better call it, Dead Man’s Land, is no great width at the point we hold. Just as I am here swallowing chalk and clay, consorting with rats and lesser forms of obscene life, mixing with wounds and blood, so may you be over there. I look across the long grass, lush with disintegrating corpses, and imagine that Prussia may have laid hold of you for other pursuits than philology. Perhaps it is you whose machine-gun taps every night like a devil-ridden typewriter against this particular area of our parapet?