When you export an army you have got to export with it a government. Our army in France is to all intents and purposes a colony in arms, with a purely male population larger than the total population of New Zealand. G.H.Q. is at once its Westminster and its War Office; its railway--from booking-office to clearing-house--and its Bank; its Scotland Yard and its Harley Street; its tinker, tailor, butcher, baker and candlestick-maker. In Pantheistic philosophies all things issue from a central principle, and all return to it. G.H.Q. is the Om of the East, the Absolute of that cloudy rhetorician from Berlin whom we used to call a philosopher, Hegel. Without G.H.Q. nothing; with G.H.Q. everything. It is not a bad description of war to say that it consists in carrying heavy things from one place to another, and that victory depends on carrying them faster and more efficiently than the enemy. The heavy things may be soldiers, rifles, bully beef, howitzers, cartridges, hospital appliances, shells, or a score of other things indispensable. That is the reason why the first aspect of war that impresses one is transportation. From London to the front there is a line of troop trains, transports and convoys, linked together very nigh as closely as the boats in a pontoon bridge. Behind the whole of the front every road, railway and canal is scheduled. On any road traffic must proceed in only one prescribed direction. If by any mischance you find yourself heading the other way, the first military policeman will very abruptly let you know all about it. A line, at once elastic and unbreakable, carries our resolve from the centre of formation here to the point of contact in the trenches. It goes _ohne Hast_ and _ohne Rast_, to borrow Teutonisms that were once more popular than they are likely ever to be again. No hurry, but no intermission of effort, that is the motto and practice of G.H.Q. The picturesque, bloody and heroic phases of war are praised everywhere and fire the imagination. But consider to yourself how our army would get on without its Carter Paterson! Its Carter Paterson is G.H.Q. G.H.Q. has got to see that things are carried, and it sees that they are. The foolish French Minister of War told a misled nation in 1870 that there was not a button missing from the gaiter of a soldier. That boast, so mad and disastrous, is to-day for our Expeditionary Force the “frigid and calculated” truth. The soldiers say to you all over the lines: “Anything you send arrives. Nothing goes wrong.” There are many others to praise as well as the Olympians of G.H.Q.--the chauffeur mending his tyre with lyrical profanity _faute de mieux_, the mechanic sweating behind the scenes at Boulogne or Calais, Mr. Tennant, Lord Kitchener--but, without G.H.Q. nothing.