The following night the brigade was relieved, after what was on the
whole a very successful action. All the officers responsible for its
Staff work seem to have been on duty, without rest or sleep, for some
thirty-six hours, and after the attack was over there were still
German prisoners to be examined.

Such is Staff work in the actual battle-line. What it needs of will,
courage, and endurance will be clear, I think, to anyone reading this
account, and the experience may be taken as typical of thousands like
it at every stage of the war, so long as it was a war of trenches and
positions. And what is also typical is that while the personal risks
of the writer are scarcely hinted at, his mind, amid all his cares of
superintendence and organisation, is still passionately alive to the
individual risks and sufferings of his comrades. He ends on what he
calls "another small point which deserves mention":

"When the officers and men of those two attacking battalions lay
in the mud on that pitch-black night, soaked to the skin and
shivering with cold, as they lay there waiting for the awful hour
when it seems as if horror itself has been let loose, and as they
wondered in their own minds what lay before them, gradually the
German bombardment started, and then by degrees increased in
intensity, until for fully thirty minutes before zero hour it
became perfect hell. Every one of those officers and men, without
a doubt, realised that the enemy had discovered that he was going
to be attacked, and that he would be on the alert and waiting for
them. Yet did any one of them falter, did any one of them for a
single moment dream of not starting with the rest of his comrades
and doing what he knew it was his duty to do?"

"I only know two things: Firstly, that a very great number of
them, if not all, realised only too well that the enemy had
discovered our plans; and, secondly, that the only ones who did
not start were those who could not, because they had been either
killed or wounded."

And now turn with me to the top of all--the General Staff of the Army
in France--the brain of the whole mighty movement. It was with no
light emotion that I found myself last January, on a bitter winter
day, among a labyrinth of small rooms running round the quadrangle of
the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, while they were still full of
Staff officers gathering up the records