Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly from floor to floor of the hierarchy. They did arrive in the end. The Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business. By the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had taught themselves to use it in the second. The frowning down of the tanks can hardly have lasted a year. The Stokes gun was not blackballed for good. It was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little gun-cotton, a little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the next life the Mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out once a year on an iceberg to some War Office brave who would not see it killed in the cradle. And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an inexpert air--sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football--so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess. V