do not realise the intense importance of inculcating in every private
soldier the necessity and the desire of outing the other fellow.
Horrible, you say; revolting. Of course it's horrible, my good man; of
course it's revolting; but what the devil do you think this war
is--minding a creche for imbecile children? _You_ bring in a crowd of
men whose sole qualification in August 1914 to be considered soldiers
was an intense and national love of games. _You_ pit them against a
machine perfect in technique, in which every part had been trained from
earliest infancy in the trade of soldiering, and the trade of ruthless
killing.

_You_ ask them to go across the water and beat this machine for _you_.
And so, if I harry you at times with details of the type
blood-curdling, it is only that you may understand something of the
nature of the task: the task which _your_ brothers and sons and
partners and clerks are carrying to a successful issue.

Has it occurred to you why they are succeeding?

You say that right is triumphing over might; that a good cause must
win. It is beautiful, it is magnificent your contention; but it is not
war. History does not support you; common sense does not bear you out.
We are beating them because as a nation of sportsmen the men have taken
to the new sport as a duck takes to water; and the new sport is to
kill, capture, wound, or out the Boche before he kills, captures,
wounds, or outs you. And having taken to it as a sport, now that the
technique and other things are equal, we are better at it than the Hun
who views it as a business.

Which recalls to mind the celebrated utterance of a celebrated officer.
Should he read these lines, I trust he will pardon the plagiarism; but
the utterance was so wonderful that it should be perpetuated, even thus
modestly. He spoke lightly; but if I may be forgiven the platitude,
there is many a true word spoken in jest.

Why not institute, he suggested, a list of battalion averages? Just as
the relative position of Tottenham Hotspur and Sheffield Wednesday in
the Football League is the subject of frenzied back chat; just as the
defeat of Yorkshire by Kent causes head shakings in the public-houses
of the North towards the end of August, why not have a league of
battalions?

A wonderful idea if one thinks into it. A dead'un two points, a
prisoner one; the Ober-lieutenant five points and a Colonel
twenty--with other grades according to fancy. Think of