They stood close side by side, like two mariners in a storm, amid the breathing spume of the foreshore, while darkness slowly sank. Right at the tip of the flat, low rocks they stood, like pilots.
“It’s no good,” barked Jack, with his hands in his pockets.
“Not a bit.”
“If you’re an officer, you study what is best, for the cause and for the men. You study your men. But you don’t ask them what to do. If you do you’re a wash-out.”
“Quite.”
“And that’s where it is in politics. You see the papers howling and blubbering for a statesman. Why, if they’d got the finest statesman the world ever saw, they’d chuck him on to the scrap heap the moment he really wanted his own way, doing what he saw was the best. That’s where they’ve got anybody who’s any good—on the scrap-heap.”
“Same the world over.”
“It’s got to alter somewhere.”
“It has.”
“When you’ve been through the army, you know that what you depend on is a general, and on discipline, and on obedience. And nothing else is the slightest bit of good.”