The result was that when a plane roared across our lines, it was virtually certain to be a German. You let fly with all the anti-aircraft guns you had even before you saw him, the instant you heard him; for otherwise he had dropped his bombs and was off before you could say “wink!”

“A precious lot of intelligence we’ll bring home working their way!” Dutertre said.

Of course they take our intelligence into account, since the blueprint of war requires that intelligence officers make use of intelligence. But even their war-by-the-blueprint had broken down. We knew perfectly well that they would never be able to make use of our intelligence—luckily. It might be brought back by us; but it would never be transmitted to the Staff. The roads would be jammed. The telephone lines would be cut. The Staff would have moved in a hurry. The really important intelligence—the enemy’s position—would have been furnished by the enemy himself.

For example. A few days earlier we of Group 2-33, having been driven back by successive stages to the vicinity of Laon, were wondering how near the front might now be—how soon we should be forced to move again. A lieutenant was sent off for information to the general in command who was seven miles away. Halfway between the airfield and the general’s headquarters the lieutenant’s motorcar ran up against a steam-roller behind which two armored cars were hidden. The lieutenant made a U-turn and started away, but a blast of machine-gun fire killed him instantly and wounded his chauffeur. The armored cars were German. They taught us where the “front” was.

 

The General Staff was like a first-rate bridge player who is asked by someone sitting in a game in the next room, “What do you think I ought to do with the queen of spades?” How can the expert, knowing nothing of that particular game, have an opinion about that queen of spades?

Actually, a General Staff has no right to be without an opinion. Besides, so long as certain elements are still in its hands, it is bound to make use of them—since otherwise it will lose its control over them. The opponents will work a squeeze play. Thus, the General Staff must take risks. So long as there is a war on it must act, even though it act blindly.

But it is, nevertheless, very hard to say what shall be done with the queen of spades when you haven’t a hand in the game. What we had learnt, meanwhile—at first with surprise, and then with the feeling that we ought to have seen it coming—was that once the cracking up begins, the machine stops running. There is no soldiering for the soldier to do.

You might think that in retreat and disaster there ought to be such a flood of pressing problems that one could hardly decide which to tackle first. The truth is that for a defeated army the problems themselves vanish. I mean by this that a defeated army no longer has a hand in the game. What is one to do with a plane, a tank, in short a queen of spades, that is not part of any known game? You hold the card back; you hesitate; you rack your brains to find use for it—and then you fling it down on the chance that it may take a trick.

Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.

For in the first place these sorties on which we were sent off were futile.