names of towns, rivers, and lakes, her mileages _à faire mourir_, and her insufferable tale of flax and jute. With an equal firmness your early power of supple and bright-coloured speech may be taken away and a rag-bag of feeble stock phrases, misfits for all your thoughts, and worn dull and dirty by everyone else, be forced upon you instead of the treasure you had. You may leave school unable to tell what stars are about you at night or to ask your way to a journey's end in any country but your own. Between your helpless mind and most of your fellow-countrymen thick screens of division are drawn, so that when you are fifteen you do not know how to speak to them with a natural courtesy; you have a vague idea that they will steal your watch if you leave it about. Above all, you have learnt that it is still "bad form" to work; that the youth with brains and no money may well be despised by the youth with money and no brains; that the absorbed student or artist is ignoble or grotesque; that to be able to afford yourself "a good time" is a natural title to respect and regard; and that to give yourself any "good time" that you can is an action of spirit. So it went on at prep. school, public school, Sandhurst, Camberley. That was how Staff College French came to be what it was. And as it was what it was, you can guess what Staff College tactics and strategy were, and why all the little brown bundles lay where they did in the nettles and grass. IV You are more aware of the stars in war than in peace. A full moon may quite halve the cares of a sentry; the Pole Star will sometimes be all that a company has, when relieved, to guide it back across country to Paradisiac rest; sleeping often under the sky, you come to find out for yourself what nobody taught you at school--how Orion is sure to be not there in summer, and Aquila always missing in March, and how the Great Bear, that was straight overhead in the April nights, is wont to hang low in the north in the autumn. Childish as it may seem to the wise, a few years' nightly view of these and other invariable arrangements may give a simple soul a surprisingly lively twinge of what the ages of faith seem to have meant by the fear of God--the awesome suspicion that there is some sort of fundamental world order or control which cannot by any means be put off or dodged or bribed to help you to break its own laws. "Anything," the old Regular warrant-officers say, "can be wangled in the army," but who shall push the Dragon or the Great Dog off his beat? And--who knows?--that may be only a part of a larger system of cause and effect, all of it as hopelessly undodgable.