ad been engaged. It
transpired that he was acting vicariously on my behalf, that he was
selecting a staff for censorship duties or some such dull occupation,
in my place. If good looks were a qualification for such employment,
that civilian must have been troubled with an _embarras de richesses_.

Amongst the many privileges and responsibilities which my position in
the early months of the war thrust upon me was that of finding myself
in more or less official relations with the Eminent K.C. and with the
Self-Appointed Spy-Catcher. One may have had the good fortune in
pre-war times to meet the former, when disguised as a mere human
being--on the links, say, or at the dinner table. The latter, one came
into contact with for the first time.

The average soldier seldom finds himself associated with the Eminent
K.C. on parade, so to speak, in the piping times of peace. When
performing, and on the war-path as you might say, this successful limb
of the law is a portentous personage. Persuasive, masterful,
clean-shaven, he fixes you with his eye as the boa-constrictor
fascinates the rabbit. Pontifically, compassionately, almost
affectionately indeed, he makes it plain to you what an ass you in
reality are, and he looks so wise the while that you are hardly able
to bear it. He handles his arguments with such petrifying precision,
he marshals his facts so mercilessly, he becomes so elusive when you
approach the real point, and he grows so bewildering if he detects the
slightest symptoms of your having discovered what he is driving at,
that he will transform an elementary military question, which you in
your folly have presumed to think that you understand, into a problem
which a very Moltke would ignominiously fail to elucidate.

Contact with the Eminent K.C. under such conditions makes you realize
to the full what an inestimable boon lawyers confer upon their
fellow-citizens when they sink all personal ambition and flock into
the House of Commons for their country's good. It makes you rejoice in
that time-honoured arrangement under which the Lord Chancellorship is
the reward and recognition, not of mastery of the principles and
practice of jurisprudence, but of parliamentary services to a
political faction. It convinces you that the importance of judges and
barristers having holidays of a length to make the public-school-boy's
mouth water, immeasurably exceeds the importance of litigation being
conducted with reasonable despa