My dear Charles,—They say we fight for money, do they? Well, so we do, and it's a long hard fight, and it's a good soldier who wins against that firmly entrenched enemy, the Command Paymaster.
When this War is over I shall take all my money out of the Bank of England and, putting it in a paper bag and not troubling to tie it up, I shall just hand it to the C.P.M. and say, "Hang on to this, will you, till I come back?" Mark my words: if I'm away for fifty years or so, every penny of it will be there when I return. It isn't his habit to part with other people's money entrusted to his keeping.
I have a sergeant, an honest upright man with no complications in his past, except that he is a Scot by birth and, happening to be there at the outbreak, enlisted in Canada. By reason of his uncertain movements he is unable to draw his food in the usual way, and yet insists, tiresomely, on being fed. So I said he'd better feed himself, and I claimed an authority for him to draw ration money in lieu of rations. Having weathered all the storms of an administrative correspondence, we eventually came by the authority itself. This was a great and happy day in the lives of myself and the forty-nine other officers who had by this time become involved in the affair. "Sgt. Blank is authorised to draw ration money in lieu of rations as from March 1st, 1916," I read to him, and sighed with relief. But it was a premature sigh. The trouble was only just beginning.
"One-and-eightpence a day, no less, you get, Sergeant," I said.
He was by now an old hand. "One-and-eightpence a day I am authorized to get, Sir," he corrected me.
A man not easily depressed, he took a cheerful view of the preliminary condition that he was paid monthly, in arrear. He proposed to spend his meal-times, during the rationless and moneyless days of March, reading the correspondence; quite enough to engage a man's whole attention during at least that period.
April 1st, 1916, duly arrived, and with it the renewal of the Sergeant's food question, "What, again?" I asked, irritably.
But the Field Cashier, who was first approached on April 3rd, wasn't in the least irritated. The subject interested him from the start. Moreover, argumentative by nature though he undoubtedly was, he was all anxiety to pay. First, however, there were one or two trifling formalities to be observed. "You see," he explained, "I can only pay out upon an authority."
With some confidence and no little pride we opened our despatch-case and produced our correspondence. He read every word of it; his pay corporal did the same, and very kindly explained it to us all as he went along. "This," they agreed, "is your authority to get the money. What I want is an authority to pay it." With expressions of mutual esteem we parted for the day, agreeing to give the matter our most earnest consideration during the week which must elapse before his return for the next pay-day.
We spent a busy week interviewing the forty-nine officers and anyone else we could get to listen. Only from the Camp Commandant did we get anything approaching enthusiasm. Camp Commandants are men of a patient disposition and a never-failing sympathy; what is better still, they invariably possess a Sergeant-Major of unscrupulous if altruistic cunning. We presented ourselves at the pay-office, on April 10th, armed with every possible form of literature, over the Camp Commandant's signature, which any reasonable Field Cashier could possibly want to read.