Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/180

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policeman will very abruptly let you know all about it.

A line, at once elastic and unbreakable, carries our resolve from the centre of formation here to the point of contact in the trenches. It goes ohne Hast and ohne Rast, to borrow Teutonisms that were once more popular than they are likely ever to be again. No hurry, but no intermission of effort, that is the motto and practice of G.H.Q. The picturesque, bloody and heroic phases of war are praised everywhere and fire the imagination. But consider to yourself how our army would get on without its Carter Paterson! Its Carter Paterson is G.H.Q.

G.H.Q. has got to see that things are carried, and it sees that they are. The foolish French Minister of War told a misled nation in 1870 that there was not a button missing from the gaiter of a soldier. That boast, so mad and disastrous, is to-day for our Expeditionary Force the "frigid and calculated" truth. The soldiers say to you all over the lines: "Anything you send arrives. Nothing goes wrong." There are many others to praise as well as the Olympians of G.H.Q.—the chauffeur mending his tyre with lyrical profanity faute de mieux, the mechanic sweating behind the scenes at Boulogne or Calais, Mr. Tennant, Lord Kitchener—but, without G.H.Q. nothing.

They clothe themselves with all varieties of function. There is the A.G. (Adjutant-General), who