The organization of our army in the field is so admirable, its departmentalization so fascinating, so simple, that the temptation lies very near me to devote this chapter to a survey in detail of the diverse services whose direction is centred at G.H.Q. Efficient organization has a strange fascination for the lay mind, as witness the transformation which a few months of soldiering effects in your young civilian. He will bombard you with technical terms; he will pepper you with alphabetical abbreviations; he will, in short, so demolish you with his salvoes of “shop” that your mind in the process is reduced to the state of a trench after the “artillery preparation” is over, and the guns are “lifting” to make way for the infantry attack. But I want to tell you of the life, of the soul of the army in the field. Your sons and husbands and brothers and cousins will fill in the details of the vast network of services which I have sketched above. While I have been talking (and boring you doubtless) of A.G.’s and A.P.M.’s and Q.M.G.’s, there are the sentries standing at the entrances to the nameless little French town, where G.H.Q. is established, waiting to inspect the impeccable credentials with which I can furnish you, and then to pass you on, with a brisk salute, into as strange a scene as you will see in the world to-day. For this sleepy little French town, with its inevitable _Grand’ Place_--a spacious cobbled square--its narrow streets mostly named after local politicians and other notabilities, its neglected-looking cathedral and churches, its garish little shops, is a kind of museum of uniforms. Never was such a variety of military caps seen together before: many variations of the “brass-hat” of the Staff Officer, from a hideous kind of Sandford-and-Merton pattern with a swollen crown, which some of the arbiters of fashions have imported from Piccadilly, to the faded red and tarnished gold of the Brigade Major from the trenches; the forage-cap of the Royal Flying Corps, the Glengarry and Kilmarnock bonnet, the _képi_ with its khaki cover--badge of the French interpreter--the slouch hat of the Gurkha, the puggaree of the Indian Cavalry, the common or garden service-cap of Mr. Thomas Atkins. Then the boots and leggings! What a multiple variety! Immaculate field-boots of the A.D.C., boned and blocked and polished daily by enthusiastic “batmen” until you can see yourself in their resplendent surface; “pig-dealers,” the grey, close-fitting, canvas leggings affected by the “horsy”; Stohwassers of every make and kind; puttees, brown, grey, and blue; ski boots; canvas field-boots; “ammunition boots,” clean or mud-caked and sodden according as the wearer’s duties take him near or away from the firing-line.