“It’s very strange to be back at the old game,” a General who had been moved from a high appointment at G.H.Q. to the command of a division in the field said to me one day. “Here I am following my natural vocation of commanding men in the field. I am getting sunburnt. I have an enormous appetite, and I sleep better than I ever did in my life. Of course, I miss my friends at G.H.Q., but this is a life of leisure compared to the grind there.” All the threads of the army run back to G.H.Q.--the threads controlling its strategy, its supplies of men, of material, of food, of equipment; its relations with our Allies, the French. To do proper justice to the work of G.H.Q. would require a volume; but, as I have set myself in this book to write an impression and not a technical review of the work of our army in the field, I will content myself with setting forth as briefly as I can the services centred at G.H.Q. as a preface to glancing at the conditions of life prevailing at the hub of the army. General Headquarters, then, consists of the Command-in-Chief, the General Staff, the Adjutant-General’s Staff, and the Quartermaster-General’s Staff. Here we have assembled the principal services of the army, the supreme direction of all centred in the person of the Commander-in-Chief assisted by the General Staff, the Adjutant-General’s Department responsible for _personnel_, and the Quartermaster-General’s Department responsible for supplies. General Staff, A.G. and Q.M.G. Departments (you see how easy it is to fall into army abbreviations!), are represented by General Staff officers and an officer representing together A.G. and Q.M.G. Departments (he is called Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster-General) attached to each army, army corps, and division, thus insuring smooth departmentalization of the different branches right through the army. Each of the subdivisions of the three great services, General Staff, A.G., Q.M.G. Departments, also have their special representatives with armies, corps, and divisions in the field in the shape of Assistant and Deputy-Assistant Directors of Medical Services, of Ordnance Services, and so on. The General Staff is divided into two divisions--Operations, known as “_O_,” and Intelligence (“_I_”). “_O_” occupies itself with strategy and tactics, the general brainwork of the army. It is also the centre to which all reports come. “_I_” is the detective of the army. It is the business of this division to endeavour to discover by every possible means all about the enemy forces, their disposition and composition. One of the most important of the sections of “_I_” is the map department, where maps, not only of our own positions, but also, as far as possible, of the enemy, are prepared.