Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/181

 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.