Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its system of training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from specimens produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the Regular Army, so that they took the lion's share of staff appointments, thus keeping out brilliant young men of the new armies, whose brain-power, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of the Sandhurst standard. Here and there, where the unprofessional soldier obtained a chance of high command or staff authority, he proved the value of the business mind applied to war, and this was seen very clearly--blindingly--in the able generalship of the Australian Corps, in which most of the commanders, like Generals Hobbs, Monash, and others, were men in civil life before the war. The same thing was observed in the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the corps commander, having been an estate agent, and many of his high officers having had no military training of any scientific importance before they handled their own men in France and Flanders. XXI As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second Army-of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of the General Staff. I often used to wonder what qualities belonged to Sir Herbert Plumer, the army commander. In appearance he was almost a caricature of an old-time British general, with his ruddy, pippin-cheeked face, with white hair, and a fierce little white mustache, and blue, watery eyes, and a little pot-belly and short legs. He puffed and panted when he walked, and after two minutes in his company Cyril Maude would have played him to perfection. The staff-work of his army was as good in detail as any machinery of war may be, and the tactical direction of the Second Army battles was not slipshod nor haphazard, as so many others, but prepared with minute attention to detail and after thoughtful planning of the general scheme. The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death machine. Even the battles of Flanders in the autumn of '17, ghastly as they were in the losses of our men in the state of the ground through which they had to fight, and in futile results, were well organized by the Second Army headquarters, compared with the abominable mismanagement of other troops, the contrast being visible to every battalion officer and even to the private soldier. How much share of this was due to Sir Herbert Plumer it is impossible for me to tell, though it is fair to give him credit for soundness of judgment in general ideas and in the choice of men.