"There will be no 'Stack arms' in my army. It is a thing one sees on a brewer's calendar—The Soldier's Dream—showing a brave private sleeping under a stack of rifles which it will take him a good half-hour to untangle when the call comes to stand to. No, a soldier had better carry the rifle with him to his meals, have it beside him always, lavish his care upon it, and in short treat it more like a wife than a weapon.
"I am reminded of the times in South Africa when we would come to a country inn where a chap could stop for beer. Well, a soldier would walk into the place, and immediately he would stand his rifle in a corner—like an umbrella, you know—'We've arrived!'—and he'd get well into his beer and a song, say, and suddenly firing would break out on the inn from four sides.
"It seemed that a Boer had slipped into the entry and picked up all the rifles and passed them around to his mates in the bushes, and—well—there you are!"
As a cadet and later as an instructor at Sandhurst, Colonel Hutchinson well knew the usefulness of the anecdote in catching and holding the attention of the young. Who could forget the lesson in this, related at Gondrecourt:
"In my youth I was a dashing ignoramus with clearer ideas than I now have on the line of demarcation between the officer and his men. They sent me out to South Africa during the trouble and I brought a detachment into a country village. It seemed quite unpromising but I was told of a sort of place 3 miles in the country that you would call a chateau in France. So I cantered out and spent the night, turning my men over to a sergeant-major. After a refreshing breakfast along in the middle of the morning—the late middle of the morning—I rode back into town, but try as I might I could not locate a single one of my men.
"Now nothing, you know, is as ineffective in a war as an officer without his men. Well, I spent the day in agony and it was not until along at dusk that the first of the blighters straggled in—quite drunk, all of them, and swearing to a man that they had engaged in five ferocious battles. It seems that about 2 miles away, in a barn, they had come on a hogshead of ginger brandy, and had stayed with it to the bitter end. Need I say that it was a great lesson to me, and that from then on I was never billeted farther than 15 rods from my men.
"As a matter of fact, I love ginger brandy."
Or this, in which the whole lesson of exactitude in the written communication is implicit:
"Now on the subject of messages, it might be well to say immediately that as far as I know no one ever received a written message during a battle. They may be written, but that I think is as far as it goes. However, they are occasionally received before and after battles, and in this connection let me say that it is no earthly good writing generalities to signify times and places.
"I mean to say, suppose you are writing a message and you write 'Report after breakfast.' Well, to Sergeant Ramrod it might mean stand-to at 3 in the morning; while to Captain Brighteyes it would mean, say, 8 o'clock. But to Colonel Blue-fish it would signify some time after 11, depending quite a bit on how the old fellow felt.