If you want an idea of the medley of mankind that swarms at G.H.Q., come in here to the Fortnum and Mason’s of the place. At all hours of the day the shop is full of officers and men, mess presidents and orderlies, ordering biscuits and liqueur and wine and tinned fruits and cake and macaroni and sardines and Heaven knows what. The trim young ladies who serve know us all by our units, if not by our names. You may hear them rating the patient and ox-like garçon, a stolid man of fifty or thereabouts. “Eh bien! le whisky pour l’Intelligence? Où est-ce? Vous ne voyez pas que le Capitaine attend les conserves pour les Indiens? Voyons, dépêchez-vous!”
One afternoon in the shop I met a Guardsman of my acquaintance, liaison officer with a French army. “The beggars won’t let me pay my mess-bill,” he protested, “so I am getting something in the way of a contribution to the mess. What do you think of asparagus?” And he went off presently to his car with a huge bundle of asperges d’Argenteuil under each arm.
There is no social life whatsoever at G.H.Q. For one thing, many of the leading inhabitants have left the war-zone, and gone to live in Paris or elsewhere; for another, the army in the field is far too busy for calling and dining. There are no amusements. There is a theatre, but it is empty. There is not even a cinematograph show. There are sing-songs arranged by one or other of the different services from time to time, and one of the A.S.C. convoys has a “rag-time band,” with mouth-organs and combs and tin cans by way of instruments, which is said to be very successful. But the fact is that no one has the time to organize amusements for the army. For G.H.Q. is the hub of the army, the power-house that supplies the driving-force to our army in the field.
Our army has established the most cordial relations with the French inhabitants of G.H.Q. The town must be truly thankful for the British occupation, for, on the testimony of the Mayor, the towns-people have made more money since the English arrived than they ever made in their lives. The English influence is very clearly seen in the shops. There are no less than three shops, for instance, doing a thriving trade in all the appurtenances of English games—badminton sets, tennis rackets and balls, cricket bats and balls and stumps, and so on. Bass’s beer, Quaker Oats, all kinds of sauces and pickles, Perrier water, English cakes and biscuits, and, of course, English jam, are in the shop-windows, and are largely advertised through the town. Notices in English are displayed on all sides. “Watches Carefully Mended,” “Top-Hole Coffee and Chocolat” (sic), “Manufacturer of Brushes and Brooms,” “Washing Done for the Military,” are some of the notices I have remarked. At dinner-time hordes of ragamuffins invade the one or two hotels and cafés with the English newspapers which have just come up, having arrived by the morning boat. In parenthesis I might remark that, in addition to the copies of the London dailies given to the troops free as part of their rations, enterprising newsagents have established themselves in all the principal towns in the zone of our army, and send out newsboys with the papers as soon as they arrive to all the troops billeted in the neighbourhood. In this way I have seen the Daily Mail sold on a road less than five miles from the firing-line, with the guns rumbling noisily in the distance.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CHIEF
“May the great God Whom I worship grant to my country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory; and may no misconduct in any way tarnish it; and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature of the British fleet. For myself, individually, I commit my life to Him Who made me, and may His blessing light upon my endeavours for serving my country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.
“Amen, Amen, Amen.”
(Nelson’s Prayer. A copy hangs in the workroom of the Commander-in-Chief at General Headquarters in France.)
You might spend a couple of days in the little town where the headquarters of our army in the field is established without becoming aware of the presence of the Commander-in-Chief. The departmentalization of a modern army is so complete, the duties are so widely delegated, the responsibilities so extensively divided, that an officer, even of the higher grades, may serve for months with the army in the field and never come into personal contact with its supreme head.
This is a state of things which arises directly out of the conditions of modern war. The direct personal influence of military leaders on their troops is no longer possible owing to the vast scale on which modern wars are conducted. In former times the General directed the battle from a hill-top which afforded him a commanding view of the operations as they unfolded themselves beneath his eyes. To-day, the General also looks down on the battle from a height, but only metaphorically speaking.
Field-Marshal Oyama playing croquet during the Battle of Mukden, the General in “Ole Luke Oie’s” brilliant sketch who fought and worsted a trout in a pleasant garden whilst hundreds of men went to their death—these are but the symbols of a state of mental detachment which is essential in the modern General called upon to handle vast masses of troops operating on a gigantic scale. To keep his mind clear and unembarrassed by a host of details, to retain his mental freshness against the moment when a supreme decision, or maybe a series of supreme decisions, has to be taken, the modern Commander-in-Chief must delegate much more of his powers than formerly, must relinquish a great measure of his direct personal influence on his men.