From The Spectator, 26 September 1914:
One knew, of course, perfectly well that there was a very good feeling between men and officers in the British Army, and that there was a great deal of mutual respect and liking and good fellowship. What is very moving, however, is the belief that every soldier seems to have that his particular officer is the ablest, bravest, most careful, and most con- siderate man in the Army. Half the stories are prefaced by such remarks as: “You see, we had the luck to have a wonderful good officer. He knew exactly what ought to be done. We’d have followed him anywhere ” —and so on. Even more general than this, which, remember, is no slavish devotion to military rank, but is to a great extent due to the young man’s respect for the older, more experienced, and more responsible man—in almost all cases the Captain or the Major is ten or twelve years older than the private, and has been a great many more years at his job—is the feeling we have noticed elsewhere that the British soldier has a complete moral and military superiority over his enemy. Again and again you will hear on his lips the words: “We could do this or that because we’d been properly trained.” He is quite oblivious of what our pessimists have so often rubbed into us, i.e., that the German Army is a business Army and ours only an Army of sportsmen, and that there is nothing in our Army to compare with the perfect scientific training of, say, the German cavalry—and so on ad nauseant, Private Smith of the Blankshires never heard, or at any rate never took heed of, such talk as this, and now he has seen the German soldier and tested his quality he has formed his judgment and thinks that the British soldier is a far better trained man than the German.
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