d previously been a commonplace;
but soon I was back in the old groove, the groove of war, with war
seeming as normal in England as peace seemed in the United States.

In London, recruiting posters with their hectic urgings to the manhood
of England to volunteer no longer blanketed the hoardings and the walls
of private buildings. Conscription had come. Every able-bodied man must
now serve at the command of the government. England seemed to have
greater dignity. The war was wholly master of her proud individualism,
which had stubbornly held to its faith that the man who fought best was
he who chose to fight rather than he who was ordered to fight.

There was a new Chief of Staff at the War Office, Sir William
Robertson, who had served for seven years as a private before he
received his commission as an officer, singularly expressing in his
career the character of the British system, which leaves open to merit
the door at the head of a long stairway which calls for hard climbing.
England believes in men and he had earned his way to the direction of
the most enormous plant with the largest personnel which the British
Empire had ever created.

It was somewhat difficult for the caller to comprehend the full extent
of the power and responsibility of this self-made leader at his desk in
a great room overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so simplified an
organization that had been brought into being in two years that it
seemed to run without any apparent effort on his part. The methods of
men who have great authority interest us all. I had first seen Sir
William at a desk in a little room of a house in a French town when his
business was that of transport and supply for the British Expeditionary
Force. Then he moved to a larger room in the same town, as Chief of
Staff of the army in France. Now he had a still larger one and in
London.

I had heard much of his power of application, which had enabled him to
master languages while he was gaining promotion step by step; but I
found that the new Chief of Staff of the British Army was not "such a
fool as ever to overwork," as one of his subordinates said, and no
slave to long hours of drudgery at his desk.

"Besides his routine," said another subordinate, speaking of Sir
William's method, "he has to do a great deal of thinking." This passing
remark was most illuminating. Sir William had to think for the whole. He
had trained others to carry out his plans, and as former head o