have had enough dinner.  They sit about looking pale, and wander off afterwards to the village pub. (I shall probably become a corporal soon.) In these islands before the war began there was a surplus of women over men of about a million.  (See the publications of the Fabian Society, now so popular among the young.) None of these women have been trusted by the government with the difficult task of cooking and giving out food to our soldiers.  No man of the ordinary soldier class ever cooks anything until he is a soldier....  All food left over after the stew or otherwise rendered uneatable by the cook is thrown away.  We throw away pail-loads. We bury meat....

“Also we get three pairs of socks.  We work pretty hard.  We don’t know how to darn socks.  When the heels wear through, come blisters.  Bad blisters disable a man.  Of the million of surplus women (see above) the government has not had the intelligence to get any to darn our socks.  So a certain percentage of us go lame.  And so on.  And so on.

“You will think all this is awful grousing, but the point I want to make—­I hereby to ease my feelings make it now in a fair round hand—­is that all this business could be done far better and far cheaper if it wasn’t left to these absolutely inexperienced and extremely exclusive military gentlemen.  They think they are leading England and showing us all how; instead of which they are just keeping us back.  Why in thunder are they doing everything?  Not one of them, when he is at home, is allowed to order the dinner or poke his nose into his own kitchen or check the household books....  The ordinary British colonel is a helpless old gentleman; he ought to have a nurse....  This is not merely the trivial grievance of my insulted stomach, it is a serious matter for the country.  Sooner or later the country may want the food that is being wasted in all these capers.  In the aggregate it must amount to a daily destruction of tons of stuff of all sorts.  Tons....  Suppose the war lasts longer than we reckon!”

From this point Hugh’s letter jumped to a general discussion of the military mind.

“Our officers are beastly good chaps, nearly all of them.  That’s where the perplexity of the whole thing comes in.  If only they weren’t such good chaps!  If only they were like the Prussian officers to their men, then we’d just take on a revolution as well as the war, and make everything tidy at once.  But they are decent, they are charming....  Only they do not think hard, and they do not understand that doing a job properly means doing it as directly and thought-outly as you possibly can.  They won’t worry about things.  If their tempers were worse perhaps their work might be better.  They won’t use maps or timetables or books of reference.  When we move to a new place they pick up what they can about it by hearsay; not one of our lot has the gumption to possess a contoured map or a Michelin guide.  They have hearsay minds.  They are