is as individualised as a half back or a centre
forward in a football team. Personal fighting has become "scrapping"
again, an individual adventure with knife, club, bomb, revolver or
bayonet. In this war we are working out things instead of thinking them
out, and these enormous changes are still but imperfectly apprehended.
The trained and specialised military man probably apprehends them as
feebly as anyone.

This is a thing that I want to state as emphatically as possible. It is
the pith of the lesson I have learnt at the front. The whole method of
war has been so altered in the past five and twenty years as to make
it a new and different process altogether. Much the larger part of this
alteration has only become effective in the last two years. Everyone is
a beginner at this new game; everyone is experimenting and learning.

The idea has been put admirably by _Punch._ That excellent picture
of the old-fashioned sergeant who complains to his officer of the new
recruit; "'E's all right in the trenches, Sir; 'e's all right at a
scrap; but 'e won't never make a soldier," is the quintessence of
everything I am saying here. And were there not the very gravest doubts
about General Smuts in British military circles because he had "had no
military training"? A Canadian expressed the new view very neatly on
being asked, in consequence of a deficient salute, whether he wanted to
be a soldier, by saying, "Not I! I want to be a fighter!"

The professional officer of the old dispensation was a man specialised
in relation to one of the established "arms." He was an infantryman, a
cavalryman, a gunner or an engineer. It will be interesting to trace the
changes that have happened to all these arms.

Before this war began speculative writers had argued that infantry drill
in close formation had now no fighting value whatever, that it was no
doubt extremely necessary for the handling, packing, forwarding and
distribution of men, but that the ideal infantry fighter was now a
highly individualised and self-reliant man put into a pit with a machine
gun, and supported by a string of other men bringing him up supplies and
ready to assist him in any forward rush that might be necessary.

The opening phases of the war seemed to contradict this. It did not
at first suit the German game to fight on this most modern theory,
and isolated individual action is uncongenial to the ordinary German
temperament and opposed to the organised social t