Years ago, when the well-known War was young, a great man sat in his sanctum exercising his grey matter.  Ho said to himself, “There is a War on.  Men, amounting to several, will be prised loose from comfortable surroundings and condemned to get on with it for the term of their unnatural lives.  They will be shelled, gassed, mined and bombed, smothered in mud, worked to the bone, bored stiff and scared silly.  Fatigues will be unending, rations short, rum diluted, reliefs late and leave nil.  Their girls will forsake them for diamond-studded munitioneers.  Their wives will write saying, ’Little Jimmie has the mumps; and what about the rent?  You aren’t spending all of five bob a week on yourself, are you?’ This is but a tithe (or else a tittle) of the things that will occur to them, and their sunny natures will sour and sicken if something isn’t done about it.”

The great man sat up all night chewing penholders and pondering on the problem.  The BIG IDEA came with the end of the eighth penholder.

He sprang to his feet, fires of inspiration flashing from his eyes, and boomed, “Let there be Funny Cuts!”—­then went to bed.  Next morning he created “I.” (which stands for Intelligence), carefully selected his Staff, arrayed them in tabs of appropriate hue, and told them to go the limit.  And they have been going it faithfully ever since.  What the Marines are to the Senior Service, “I.” is to us.  Should a Subaltern come in with the yarn that the spook of HINDENBURG accosted him at Bloody Corner and offered him a cigar, or a balloon cherub buttonhole you with the story of a Bosch tank fitted with rubber tyres, C-springs and hot and cold water, that he has seen climbing trees behind St. Quentin, we retort, “Oh, go and tell it to ‘I.’” and then sit back and see what the inspired official organ of the green tabs will make of it.  A hint is as good as a wink to them, a nudge ample.  Under the genius of these imaginative artists the most trivial incident burgeons forth into a LE QUEUX spell-binder, and the whole British Army, mustering about its Sergeant-Majors, gets selected cameos read to it every morning at roll-call, laughs brokenly into the jaws of dawn and continues chuckling to itself all day.  Now you know.

Our Adjutant had a telephone call not long ago.  “Army speaking,” said a voice.  “Will you send somebody over to Rataplan and see if there is a Town Major there?”

The Adjutant said he would, and a N.C.O. was despatched forthwith.  He returned later, reporting no symptoms of one, so the Adjutant rang up Exchange and asked to be hooked on to Army Headquarters.  “Which branch?” Exchange inquired.  “Why, really I don’t know—­forgot to ask,” the Adjutant confessed.  “I’ll have a try at ‘A.’”