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 of it, the art of carrying heavy things from one place to another. You have got to move obvious necessaries, such as food and fuel and housing-timber and spare clothes; and human frames—that to marching men are heavier at the end of a long day than anything in the world; and rifles, bayonets and bombs, the ultimate ratio decidendi of all operations; and shells that look like death, and weigh as much as a model bungalow; and frowning Frankensteins of guns that look like the Day of Judgment, and weigh as much as a small foundry; and the wounded who come back with the Cross, steeped in blood, to stand as a fit symbol of their sacrifice. But you must move a great deal that is less obvious and more necessary. When you export an army such as ours, which is in reality a nation and not a small one, you must send with it a government. Now knowledge, and the administrative body in which it expresses itself, is of all things the most difficult to export. This scheme of transportation is the first miracle of sheer brain-power that strikes you, but it is not the greatest. I do not scruple to say that as a study in government, that is to say, in the efficient conduct of human things in the mass, the present army, as organised through G.H.Q., is far more impressive than most civil constitutions.

I do not speak merely of the actual Higher Command. Your heads of that must carry all the apparatus of all its range from minor tactics to mili