“My dear Parent, this is a swearing letter.  I must let go to somebody.  And somehow none of the other chaps are convenient.  I don’t know if I ought to be put against a wall and shot for it, but I hereby declare that all the officers of this battalion over and above the rank of captain are a constellation of incapables—­and several of the captains are herewith included.  Some of them are men of a pleasant disposition and carefully aborted mental powers, and some are men of an unpleasant disposition and no mental powers at all.  And I believe—­a little enlightened by your recent letter to The Times—­that they are a fair sample of the entire ‘army’ class which has got to win this war.  Usually they are indolent, but when they are thoroughly roused they are fussy.  The time they should spend in enlarging their minds and increasing their military efficiency they devote to keeping fit.  They are, roughly speaking, fit—­for nothing.  They cannot move us thirty miles without getting half of us left about, without losing touch with food and shelter, and starving us for thirty-six hours or so in the process, and they cannot count beyond the fingers of one hand, not having learnt to use the nose for arithmetical operations....  I conclude this war is going to be a sort of Battle of Inkerman on a large scale.  We chaps in the ranks will have to do the job.  Leading is ’off.’...

“All of this, my dear Parent, is just a blow off.  I have been needlessly starved, and fagged to death and exasperated.  We have moved five-and-twenty miles across country—­in fifty-seven hours.  And without food for about eighteen hours.  I have been with my Captain, who has been billeting us here in Cheasingholt.  Oh, he is a MUFF!  Oh God! oh God of Heaven! what a MUFF!  He is afraid of printed matter, but he controls himself heroically.  He prides himself upon having no ’sense of locality, confound it!’ Prides himself!  He went about this village, which is a little dispersed, at a slight trot, and wouldn’t avail himself of the one-inch map I happened to have.  He judged the capacity of each room with his eye and wouldn’t let me measure, even with God’s own paces.  Not with the legs I inherit.  ‘We’ll put five fellahs hea!’ he said.  ’What d’you want to measure the room for?  We haven’t come to lay down carpets.’  Then, having assigned men by coup d’oeil, so as to congest half the village miserably, he found the other half unoccupied and had to begin all over again.  ‘If you measured the floor space first, sir,’ I said, ‘and made a list of the houses—­’ ’That isn’t the way I’m going to do it,’ he said, fixing me with a pitiless eye....

“That isn’t the way they are going to do it, Daddy!  The sort of thing that is done over here in the green army will be done over there in the dry.  They won’t be in time; they’ll lose their guns where now they lose our kitchens.  I’m a mute soldier; I’ve got to do what I’m told; still, I begin to understand the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.