3rd January 1916
Road making continued. Anderson and Smellie out on Reconnaissance.
Mess stores getting perilously low. How the deuce a mess is expected to exist up here where nothing can be bought, when officers who are sent into Salonika to get mess stores are kept there for about a month. It is 6 days now since Nelson should have come up with things and a supplementary list that went down with Rutherford the night before last looks like coming up first.
Absurd argument with Anderson and Smellie in which they endeavoured to make out that the line officer was a born fool carefully preserved from coming by any knowledge, military or otherwise in the process of training and that the New Army officers, and I think they themselves and Dempster in particular, could give [?]points to any three Captains who served in the First Army. Short of telling Smellie what we think of him, such an argument is hard to answer.
All this I think due to a bon mot of Beasley’s who, new come from a line Regiment, got a nasty jar when he came across sundry of our officers and is reported as saying, when Moffatt and Anderson were in Salonika and there was a dispute as to which would come up and when that he did not care what they did with the second officers so long as they left him the subalterns.
Wrote Wilfie, Walter Prentice and Major Tate about the Indian Civil and Egyptian Civil and my chances.