victory slip till the Germans crept back in the dark to the fields east of Vimy from which they had fled in despair. But slowness to judge can hardly be called hero-worship: at most, a somewhat sere October phase of that vernal religion. One of the heavenly things on which the New Army had almost counted, in its green faith, was that our higher commands would have genius. Of course, we had no right to do it. No X has any right to ask of Y that Y shall be Alexander the Great or Bach or Rembrandt or Garrick, or any kind of demonic first-rater. As reasonably send precepts to the Leviathan to come ashore. Yet we had indulged that insane expectation, just as we had taken it for granted that this time the nation would be as one man, and nobody "out to do a bit for himself on the quiet." And now behold the falling leaf and no Leviathan coming ashore in response to our May-Day desires. Certainly other things, highly respectable, came. The Second Army Staff's direction of that autumn's almost continuous battles was of a competence passing all British precedents. Leap-frogging waves of assault, box barrages, creeping barrages, actions, interactions, and counter-actions were timed and concerted as no Staff of ours had done it before. The intricate dance which has to go on behind a crowded battle front, so that columns moving east and west and columns moving north and south shall not coincide at cross roads, was danced with the circumstantial precision of the best ballets. An officer cast away somewhere in charge of a wayside smithy for patching up chipped guns felt that there was a power perched on the top of the hill at Cassel which smelt out a bit of good work, or of bad, wherever anyone did it. Sense, keenness, sympathy, resolution, exactness--all the good things abode in that eyrie which have to be in attendance before genius can bring off its marvels; every chamber swept and garnished, and yet--.