Our Staff College had been hopelessly inefficient in its system of training, if I am justified in forming such an opinion from specimens produced by it, who had the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam. There was also a close corporation among the officers of the Regular Army, so that they took the lion’s share of staff appointments, thus keeping out brilliant young men of the new armies, whose brainpower, to say the least of it, was on a higher level than that of the Sandhurst standard. Here and there, where the unprofessional soldier obtained a chance of high command or staff authority, he proved the value of the business mind applied to war, and this was seen very clearly⁠—blindingly⁠—in the able generalship of the Australian Corps, in which most of the commanders, like Generals Hobbs, Monash, and others, were men in civil life before the war. The same thing was observed in the Canadian Corps, General Currie, the corps commander, having been an estate agent, and many of his high officers having had no military training of any scientific importance before they handled their own men in France and Flanders.