* * * * *

THE GREAT MAN.

What am I doing, Dickie?  Well, I’ll tell you.  I’m one of those subalterns you hear of sometimes.  You know the kind of things they do?  They look after their men and ask themselves every day in the line (as per printed instructions), “Am I offensive enough?” In trenches they are ever to the fore, bombing, patrolling, raiding, wiring and inspecting gas helmets.  Working-parties under heavy fire are as meat and drink, rum and biscuits to them.  Once every nine months, and when all Staff officers have had three goes, they get leave in order to give excuse for the appointment of A.P.M.’s.  There are thousands of us, and we are supposed to run the War.  These are the things which I am sure (if you get newspapers in Ceylon) jump into your mind the moment I mention the word subaltern, and I may as well tell you that in associating me with any one of these deeds at the present time you are entirely wrong.

I sit in a room, an office papered with maps in all degrees of nakedness, from the newest and purest to those woad-stained veterans called objective maps.  In this room, where regimental officers tread lightly, speak softly and creep away, awed and impotent—­HE sits.  “HE” is a G.S.O.3, or General Staff Officer, third grade.  He it is who looks after the welfare of some hundred thousand troops (when everybody else is out).  I am attached to him—­not personally, be it understood, but officially.  I am there to learn how he does it (whatever it is).  High hopes, never realised, are held out to me that if I am good and look after the office during mealtimes I shall have a job of my very own one day—­possibly two days.

And he is very good to me.  He rarely addresses me directly, except when short of matches, but he often gives me an insight into things by talking to himself aloud.  He does this partly to teach me the reasoning processes by which he arrives at the momentous decisions expected of a G.S.O.3, and partly because he values my intelligent consideration.

This morning, for instance, furnished a typically brilliant example of our co-operation.  “I wonder,” he said (and as he spoke I broke off from my daily duties of writing to Her)—­“I wonder what about these Flares?  Division say they want two thousand red and white changing to green—­oh no, it’s the other lot; no, that is right—­I don’t think they can want two thousand possibly.  We might give them half for practice purposes, or say five hundred.  Still, if they say they want two thousand I suppose they do; but then there’s the question of what we’ve got in hand.  All right, let them have them.”

That was one of the questions I helped to settle.

“Heavens!” he went on, “five hundred men for digging cable trenches!  No, no, I don’t think.  They had five hundred only the other night—­no, they didn’t; it was the other fellows—­no, that was the night before-no, I was right as usual.  One has so many things to think of.  Well, they can’t have them, that’s certain; it can’t be important—­yes, it is, though, if things were to—­yes, yes—­we’ll let them have them.”