aw the wood as well as the trees, and the whole broad sweep
of the problem which confronted him. There was something fascinating as
well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For
the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all
there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always
a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as
I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and
staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a
scientific business, according to the methods of science--calculating
the weight and effect of gun-fire, the strength of the enemy's defenses
and man-power, the psychology of German generalship and of German
units, the pressure which could be put on British troops before the
breaking-point of courage, the relative or cumulative effects of
poison-gas, mines, heavy and light artillery, tanks, the disposition of
German guns and the probability of their movement in this direction or
that, the amount of their wastage under our counter-battery work, the
advantages of attacks in depth--one body of troops "leap-frogging,"
another in an advance to further objectives--the time-table of
transport, the supply of food and water and ammunition, the comfort of
troops before action, and a thousand other factors of success.

Before every battle fought by the Second Army, and of the eve of it, Sir
John Harington sent for the war correspondents and devoted an hour or
more to a detailed explanation of his plans. He put down all his cards
on the table with perfect candor, hiding nothing, neither minimizing nor
exaggerating the difficulties and dangers of the attack, pointing out
the tactical obstacles which must be overcome before any chance of
success, and exposing the general strategy in the simplest and clearest
speech.

I used to study him at those times, and marveled at him. After intense
and prolonged work at all this detail involving the lives of thousands
of men, he was highly wrought, with every nerve in his body and brain
at full tension, but he was never flurried, never irritable, never
depressed or elated by false pessimism or false optimism. He was a
chemist explaining the factors of a great experiment of which the
result was still uncertain. He could only hope for certain results after
careful analysis and synthesis. Yet he was not dehumanized. He laughed
sometimes at surprises he had caused