2 P. M.—Lunched with an American lady-doctor. How feminine the Americans can be.
7 P. M.—A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over again. Substitute the Tenth Army for the Traffordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks Spruit into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into the frowning scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it. The Staff were obviously gratified when I told them about Donkelsdorp.
The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle of massed battalions, and Gazeka was after them like a rat after a terrier. I knew that his horse-guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese service to discourage unnecessary changing of ground), but his men bit the trails and dragged them up by their teeth. Slowly the Muscovites peeled off the steaming mountain and took the funicular down the other side.
I wonder what my friend Smuts would make of the Yen-tai coal mine? Well, well.—"Something accomplished, something done."
The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition for the beginner, since it involves a knowledge of at least two European languages. It is (a) cardinal rule that all places should be described as points d'appui, the simple process of scouting looks far better as Verschleierung, and the adjective "strategical" may be used without any meaning in front of any noun.
But the military manner was revolutionized by the war. Mr. Belloc created a new Land and a new Water. We know now why the Persian commanders demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a Greek town; it was the weekly demand of the Great General Staff, as it called for its favorite paper. Mr. Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into a new style: it is the last cry of historians' English, because one was invented by a German and the other by a Greek.
WINTER MIST
By Robert Palfrey Utter
Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Washington. He graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so many Harvard men in this book: I didn't know they were Harvard men until too late) in 1898 and took his Ph.D. there in 1906. After a varied experience, including editorial work on the Youth's Companion, reporting on the New York Evening Post, ranching in Mexico and graduate study at Harvard, he went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of English. He was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at Beaune, France, 1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of English at the University of California.
Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has published Guide to Good English (1914), Every-Day Words and Their Uses (1916), and Every-Day Pronunciation (1918).
Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the lasting stimulus his teaching has given them: that he can beautifully practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows.