* * * * *

The Victory.

[For J.B., with the author’s affectionate pride.]

Hindenburg to MACKENSEN.

  Dear Mac, in that prodigious thrust
  In which your valiant legions vie
  With HANNIBAL’S renown, I trust
  You go a shade more strong than I;
  Lately I’ve lost a lot of scalps,
  Which is a dem’d unpleasant thing;
  You may enjoy the Julian Alps—­
  I do not like this Julian Byng.

  I find him full of crafty pranks: 
  Without the usual warning fire
  He loosed his beastly rows of tanks
  And sent ’em wallowing through my wire;
  For days and days he kept the lid
  Hard down upon his low designs,
  Then simply walked across and did
  Just what he liked with all my lines.

  The fellow doesn’t keep the rules;
  Experts (I’m one myself) advise
  That in trench-warfare even fools
  Cannot be taken by surprise;
  It isn’t done; and yet he came
  With never a previous “Are you there?”
  And caught me—­this is not the game—­
  Bending my thoughtful gaze elsewhere.

Later.—­My route is toward the rear.  Where I shall stand and stop the rot Lord only knows; and now I hear Your forward pace is none too hot; Indeed, with Byng upon the burst, If at this rate I make for home, I doubt not who will get there first, I to the Rhine, or you to Rome.

O.S.

* * * * *

The literary adviser.

No, he does not appear in the Gazette.  War establishments know him not and his appointment throws no additional labour upon the staff of Messrs. Cox and Co.  Unofficially he is known as O.C.  Split Infinitives.  His duties are to see that the standard of literary excellence, which makes the correspondence of the Corps a pleasure to receive, is maintained at the high level set by the Corps Commander himself.  Indeed the velvety quality of our prose is the envy of all other formations.

Apart from duties wholly literary, he is also O.C.  Code Names.  The stock-in-trade for this skilled labour is an H.B. pencil and a Webster Dictionary.  The routine is simplicity itself.  As soon as anybody informs him of a new arrival in the area he fishes out the dictionary, plays Tit-Tat-Toe with the H.B., writes out the word that it lands upon at the end of his rhyme, and, hey presto! there is another day’s work done.

But one day, for the sake of greater secrecy, it became necessary to rename all the units of the area, and the Literary Adviser suddenly found himself put to it to provide about three hundred new Code Names at once.  Heroically he set to work with his dictionary, his H.B. pencil, and his little rhyme.  For two days the Resplendent Ones in the General Staff Office bore patiently with the muttering madman in the corner.