"But the British advance?" Hazlewood looked at her. "Ah yes, the British advance," he murmured. "And you promised that you'd find me some work," Sylvia said. "Frankly, it's no good your beginning to learn now." She must have shown as much disappointment as she felt, for he added: "Well, after dinner to-night you shall take down the figures of one or two long telegrams." "Anything," offered Sylvia, eagerly. "It's all that Miss Potberry could have done at present. I'm not writing any reports, so her expert shorthand of which I was assured would have been wasted. Reports! One of the revelations of this war to me was the extraordinary value that professional soldiers attach to the typewritten word. I suppose it's a minor manifestation of the impulse that made Wolfe say he would rather have written Gray's 'Elegy' than take Quebec. If typewriters had been invented in his time he might have said, 'I would rather be in the War Office and be able to read my report of the capture of Quebec than take it.' I'm sure that the chief reason of a knowledge of Latin being still demanded for admission to Sandhurst is the hope universally cherished in the army that every cadet's haversack contains a new long Latin intransitive verb which can be used transitively to supplant one of the short Saxon verbs that still disfigure military correspondence. I can imagine such a cadet saying, 'Sir, I would sooner have been the first man that wrote of evacuating wounded than take Berlin.' The trouble with men of action is that something written means for them something done. The labor of writing is so tremendous and the consequent mental fatigue so overwhelming that they cannot bring themselves to believe otherwise. The general public, even after fifteen months of war, has the same kind of respect for the printed word. How long does it take you to read a letter? I imagine that two readings would give you the gist of it? Well, it takes a British general at least five readings, and even then he only understands a word here and there, unless it's written in his own barbaric departmental English. If I had a general over me here--which, thank Heaven, I've not--and I were to make a simple suggestion, he would invite me to put it on paper. This he would do because he would presume that life would be too short for me to succeed, and that, therefore, he should be forever spared having to make up his mind in response to any prompting on my side. If, on the other hand, I did by chance embody my suggestion in typescript, he would be amazed at the result, and by some alchemy of thought, if he could write on the top 'Concur,' he would feel that he had created the suggestion himself. The effort even to write 'Concur' represents for the average British general the amount of labor involved by a woman in producing a child, and ... but look here--to-night at half past seven. So long!" Hazlewood hurried away; at dinner that night he went on with his discourse.