III There may be laid up in Heaven a pattern of some front line by which the Staff in its rear would be really loved. But such love is not in the nature of man. If the skin on Mr. Dempsey's knuckles could speak, and were perfectly frank, it would not say that it loved the unexposed and unabraded tissues of Mr. Dempsey's directive brain. Hotspur, in deathless words, has aired the eternal grudge of the combatant soldier against the Brass Hat-- I remember, when the fight was done, When I was dry with rage and extreme toil, Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed, Fresh as a bridegroom. So the jaundiced narrative flows on and on, doing the fullest justice on record to some of the main heads of the front line's immemorial distaste for the Staff--for its too Olympian line of comment upon the vulgar minutiæ of combat, its offensively manifest facilities for getting a good shave, its fertility in gratuitous advice of an imperfectly practical kind, and its occasional lapses from grace in speaking of the men, the beloved men, the objects of every good combatant officer's jealous and wrathful affection. Or, again, you might say that a Staff is a trouser-button, which there are few to praise while it goes on with its work, and very few to abstain from cursing when it comes off. When a Staff's work is done well the front line only feels as if Nature were marching, without actual molestation, along some beneficent course of her own. But when some one slips up, and half a brigade is left to itself in a cold, cold world encircled by Germans, the piercing eye of the front line perceives in a moment how pitifully ill the Brass Hats deserve of their country. If you are an infantry-man the Brass Hats above you are, in your sight, a kind of _ex officio_ children of perdition, like your own gunners. As long as your own gunners go on achieving the masterpiece of mathematics that is required to confine the incidence of their shells to the enemy you feel that, just for the moment, a gunner's rich natural endowment of original sin is not telling for all it is worth. But some day the frailty of man or of metal causes a short one to drop once again among you and your friends; and then you are mightily refreshed and confirmed in the stern Calvinistic faith of the infantry that there are chosen vessels of grace and also chosen vessels of homicidal mania.