Diary of a Drug Fiend

272 The Diary of a Drug Fiend chop and a piece of Stilton, and then pull out a cigar that cost half as much again as his dinner. He studied our charts as if they had been maps and he was trying to work out his overland route from Bokhara to Khatmandu |! Ultimately he said, “‘ There seems a very long gap here—fifteen hours—g to 12, that’s right, isn’t it?” He turned to Maisie for confirmation. He was, so he said, quite unable to trust himself to calculate. Maisie entered into the spirit of the absurdity and counted it solemnly out on her fingers. The tone of his voice had been mournful, as if his plans had been seriously disconcerted. That was another trick of his that put people off. It was Lou’s sparkling eyes that told me what he meant. And then I was brought up with a tremendous shock to realise what it meant to me. I went to the chart myself with excited curiosity, quite as if I had never seen it before. It did not need a mathematician to put the situation into English. The crosses for the last thirty-six hours were crowded into a few spaces, leaving large empty gaps. In other words, the indulgence had become irregular. I stared at the chart as if it had been a ghost. Lamus turned his head and looked down at me over his shoulder with a queer grin. Then he uttered the extraordinary word: ‘ Kriegsptel.”’ I was completely taken aback. What in the name of thunder was the man talking about e And then it slowly dawned upon me that there was an analogy between the chart and the distribution of the troops in the war. It was obvious as soon as the idea struck one. As long as the armies were evenly distributed along the line, it was a matter of trench warfare. Great victories and defeats were impossible in the nature of things. But once the troops were massed at points of vantage, aggregated in huge mobile units, it became possible to destroy them on the large scale. When a British square is broken, the annihilation of