The little well-informed lady remarked abruptly that she had two sons; one was just home wounded from Suvla Bay.  What her son told her made her feel very grave.  She said that the public was still quite in the dark about the battle of Anafarta.  It had been a hideous muddle, and we had been badly beaten.  The staff work had been awful.  Nothing joined up, nothing was on the spot and in time.  The water supply, for example, had gone wrong; the men had been mad with thirst.  One regiment which she named had not been supported by another; when at last the first came back the two battalions fought in the trenches regardless of the enemy.  There had been no leading, no correlation, no plan.  Some of the guns, she declared, had been left behind in Egypt.  Some of the train was untraceable to this day.  It was mislaid somewhere in the Levant.  At the beginning Sir Ian Hamilton had not even been present.  He had failed to get there in time.  It had been the reckless throwing away of an army.  And so hopeful an army!  Her son declared it meant the complete failure of the Dardanelles project....

“And when one hears how near we came to victory!” she cried, and left it at that.

“Three times this year,” said Raeburn, “we have missed victories because of the badness of our staff work.  It’s no good picking out scapegoats.  It’s a question of national habit.  It’s because the sort of man we turn out from our public schools has never learnt how to catch trains, get to an office on the minute, pack a knapsack properly, or do anything smartly and quickly—­anything whatever that he can possibly get done for him.  You can’t expect men who are habitually easy-going to keep bucked up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of time.  All their training is against it.  All their tradition.  They hate being prigs.  An Englishman will be any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig.  That’s why we’ve lost three good fights that we ought to have won—­and thousands and thousands of men—­and material and time, precious beyond reckoning.  We’ve lost a year.  We’ve dashed the spirit of our people.”

“My boy in Flanders,” said Mr. Britling, “says about the same thing.  He says our officers have never learnt to count beyond ten, and that they are scared at the sight of a map....”

“And the war goes on,” said the little woman.

“How long, oh Lord! how long?” cried Mr. Britling.

“I’d give them another year,” said the staff officer.  “Just going as we are going.  Then something must give way.  There will be no money anywhere.  There’ll be no more men....  I suppose they’ll feel that shortage first anyhow.  Russia alone has over twenty millions.”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Raeburn....

“Do you think, sir, there’ll be civil war?” asked the young staff officer abruptly after a pause.

There was a little interval before any one answered this surprising question.