Let us take it that a cat is chosen--a quiet thing in cats--crimson on
a green-and-white chess-board background. Forthwith (as adjutants say)
a crimson cat on a green-and-white chess-board background is painted
and embroidered on everything that can be painted and embroidered
on--limbers and waggons and hand-carts and arm-bands and the
tin-hats of the Staff. And the Division goes forth as it were masked,
disguised, just like one of Mr. LE QUEUX'S diplomatist heroes at a
fancy-dress ball, wearing a domino. You perceive the mystery of it?
None of your naked numbers for us B.E.F. men. The Division marches
through a village, and the dear old Man Who Knows, cropping up again
in the army, says, "Ha! A red cat on a green-and-white chess-board
back-ground? That's the Seventeenth Division."

You see it now? The enemy agent overhears. The false news is sent
crackling through the ether to Berlin (wireless, my dear, in the
cellar, of course). The German General Staff looks up the village on
a map, and sticks into it a flag marked 17. Not 580, mark you. And
the General Staff frowns, and Majesty pushes the ends of its moustache
into its eyes at the knowledge that the Seventeenth Division is in
----.

And all the time it is in ----! And the agent pockets his cheque. So
wars are won and lost.

Just conceive the romance of it. It is heraldry gone mad.

Myself, however, I incline to another theory as to the origin of these
symbols.

A Higher Command enters his office. Higher Commands always enter. The