In 1917, as our car wound through the narrow streets of Montreuil, I remember noticing a yellow car in front of us, unlike the usual Army car, and was told that it contained the new head of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and that 10,000 women were now to be drafted into France, to take the place of men wanted for the fighting line.  And a little later at Abbeville I found General Asser, then Inspector-General of the Lines of Communication, deep in the problems connected with the housing and distribution of the new Women’s Contingent.  “Two women want the accommodation of three men; but three women can only do the work of two men.”  That seemed to be the root fact of the moment, and accommodation and work were being calculated accordingly.  Then the women came, and took their place in the clerical staffs of the various military departments, of Army or other Headquarters, in the Army canteens, in the warehouses and depots of the ports.  It is clear that, during the concluding year of the war, they rendered services of which British women may reasonably be proud; and in the retreat of last March, by universal testimony, they bore themselves with special coolness and pluck.  Many of them were suddenly involved in the rush and confusion of battle, which was never meant to come near them.  They took the risks and bore the strain of it with admirable composure.  The men beside whom they marched or rode when depots canteens, and headquarters disappeared in the general over-running of our fighting lines, took note!  It was yet another page in that history of a new Womanhood we are all collaborating in to-day.  And I will add a last touch, within my personal knowledge, when in January, at Montreuil, in a room at G.H.Q., an officer of A. described to me how he had recently interviewed a gathering of women belonging to Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Corps, and had asked them whether they wished to be immediately demobilised.  Almost without exception the answer came:  “Not while we can be useful to the Army.”  They had enlisted for the war; the war was not over, in spite of the Armistice; and, though it would be pleasant to go home, they still stuck to their job.

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Thus hastily I have run through the labour of various kinds which was the base and condition of the fighting force.  I have left myself room for only a few last words as to that Directing Intelligence which was its brain and soul—­i.e., the Staff work of the Army—­from the brilliant and distinguished men at General Headquarters immediately surrounding the Commander-in-Chief, down to the Brigade and Battalion Staffs, the members of which actually conduct the daily and nightly operations of war from the close neighbourhood of the fighting line.  In a preceding chapter I have given a general outline of the duties falling to the Staff of the First Army in the attack on the Hindenburg line.  The range and variety of them was immense.  But their success,