Varied nature of my responsibilities Inconvenience caused by a Heath-Caldwell being a brother-Director on the General Staff An interview with Lord Methuen The Man of Business His methods when in charge of a Government Department War Office branches under Men of Business The art of advertisement This not understood by War Office officials The paltry staff and accommodation at the disposal of the Director of Supplies and Transport, and what was accomplished Good work of the Committee of Imperial Defence in providing certain organizations for special purposes before the war The contre-espionage branch The Government’s singular conduct on the occasion of the first enemy spy being executed at the Tower The cable censorship The post office censorship A visit from Admiral Bacon His plan of landing troops by night at Ostend Some observations on the subject Sir J. Wolfe Murray leaves the War Office An appreciation of his work The Dardanelles papers to be presented to Parliament referred to me My action in the matter and the appointment of the Dardanelles Committee in consequence Mr. Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War His activities I act as D.C.I.G.S. for a month Sound organization introduced by Sir W. Robertson Normal trench-warfare casualties and battle casualties I learn the facts about the strengths of the different armies in the field Troubles with the Cabinet over man-power Question of resignation of the Army Council The Tank Corps and Tanks The War Office helps in the reorganization of the Admiralty Some of the War Cabinet want to divert troops to the Isonzo The folly of such a plan Objections to it indicated Arrival of General Pershing in London I form one of the party that proceeds to Devonport to meet Colonel House and the United States Commissioners Its adventures Admirals adrift Mr. Balfour meets the Commissioners at Paddington.

During those months as Director of Military Operations my responsibilities were in reality of a most varied nature. They covered pretty well the whole field of endeavour, from drafting documents bearing upon operations subjects for the edification of the very elect down to returning to him by King’s Messenger the teeth which a well-known staff-officer had inadvertently left behind him at his club when returning to the front from short leave. One was for various reasons brought into contact with numbers of public men who were quite outside of Government circles and official institutions, and whose acquaintance it was agreeable to make. Moreover, officers of high standing, over from the front or holding commands at home, would look in to pass the time of day and keep one posted with what was going on afield. Soldiers appointed to some new billet overseas had constantly to be fitted out with instructions, or to be provided with books, maps, and cipher. The last that I was to see of that brilliant leader, General Maude, was when I went down to Victoria to see him and my old contemporary of “Shop” days, General E. A. Fanshawe, off on their hurried journey to the Dardanelles in August 1915.

A certain amount of minor inconvenience in connection with telephones, correspondence, visits, and so on, arose owing to General Heath-Caldwell taking up the appointment of Director of Military Training about six months after mobilization. That two out of the four Directors on the General Staff within the War Office should have practically the same name, was something of a coincidence. Lord Methuen, who was then holding a very important appointment in connection with the home army (with which I had nothing to do), was ushered into my room one day. He had scarcely sat down when he began, “Now I know how tremendously busy all you people are, and I won’t keep you one moment, but ...,” and he embarked on some question in connection with the training of the troops in the United Kingdom. I tried to interrupt; but he checked me with a gesture, and took complete command of the situation. “No, no. Just let me finish what I want to say ...” and off he was again in full cry, entirely out of control. After one or two other attempts to stop him, I had to give it up. You can’t coerce a Field-Marshal: it isn’t done. At last, after about five minutes of rapid and eager exposition of what he had come to the War Office to discuss, he wound up with “Well, what d’you think of that. I haven’t kept you long, have I?” It was then up to me to explain that he had attacked the wrong man, that the question he was interested in did not concern me, and that the best thing I could do was to conduct him forthwith to Heath-Caldwell’s lair.

One saw something of the Man of Business in those days, as also later. Next to the “Skilled Workman,” the “Man of Business” is the greatest impostor amongst the many impostors at present preying on the community. Just as there are plenty of genuine Skilled Workmen, so also are there numbers of Men of Business who, thanks to their capacity and to the advantage that they have taken of experience, constitute real assets to the nation. Latter-day events have, however, taught us that the majority of the individuals who pose as Skilled Workmen are in reality engaged on operations which anybody in full power of his faculties and of the most ordinary capacity can learn to carry on within a very few hours, if not within a very few minutes. What occurred in Government departments during the war proved that a very large percentage of the Men of Business, who somehow found their way into public employ, were no great catch even if they did manage to spend a good deal of the taxpayer’s money. To draw a sharp dividing-line between the nation’s good bargains and the nation’s bad bargains in this respect would be out of the question. To try to separate the sheep from the goats would be as invidious as it would be vain there were a lot of hybrids. But it was not military men within the War Office alone who suffered considerable disillusionment on being brought into contact with the Man of Business in the aggregate; that was also the experience of the Civil Service in general.

The successful Man of Business has owed his triumphs to aptitude in capturing the business of other people. Therefore when he blossoms out as a Government official in charge of a department, he devotes his principal energies to trying to absorb rival departments. It was a case of fat kine endeavouring to swallow lean kine, but finding at times that the lean kine were not so badly nourished after all and took a deal of swallowing. And yet successful Men of Business, when introduced into Government departments, do have their points. One wonders how much the income-tax payer would be saved during the next decade or two had some really great knight of industry, content to do his own work and not covetous of that of other people (assuming such a combination of the paragon and the freak to exist), been placed in charge of the Ministry of Munitions as soon as Mr. Lloyd George had, with his defiance of Treasury convention, with his wealth of imagination, and with his irrepressible and buoyant courage, set the thing up on the vast foundations already laid by the War Office. Unsuccessful Men of Business, when introduced into Government departments, have their points too, but they are mostly bad points.

The Man of Business’ procedure, when he is placed at the head of a Government department, or of some branch of a Government department, in time of war is well known. He makes himself master of some gigantic building or some set of buildings. He then sets to work to people the premises with creatures of his own. He then, with the assistance of the superior grades amongst the creatures, becomes wrapped up in devising employment for the multitudinous personnel that has been got together. He then finds that he has not got sufficient accommodation to house his legions and so it goes on. He talks in moments of relaxation of “introducing business methods into Whitehall.” But that is absurd. You could not introduce business methods into Whitehall, because there is not room enough; you would have to commandeer the whole of the West End, and then you would be cramped. While the big men at the top are wrestling with housing problems, the staff are engaged in writing minutes to each other a process which, when indulged in, in out-of-date institutions of the War Office, Admiralty, Colonial Office type, is called “red tape,” but which, when put in force in a department watched over by Men of Business, is called “push and go.” Engulfed in one of the mushroom branches that were introduced into the War Office in the later stages of the war, I could not but be impressed by what I saw. The women were splendid: the way in which they kept the lifts in exercise, each lady spending her time going up and down, burdened with a tea-cup or a towel and sometimes with both, was beyond all praise.

One is prejudiced perhaps, and may not on that account do full justice to the achievements of some of those civilian branches which were evolved within the War Office and which elbowed out military branches altogether or else absorbed them. But they enjoyed great advantages, and on that account much could fairly be expected of them. Your civilian, introduced into the place with full powers, a blank cheque and the uniform of a general officer, stood on a very different footing from the soldier ever hampered by a control that was not always beneficently administered financial experts on the War Office staff are apt to deliver their onsets upon the Treasury to the battle-cry of Kamerad. Still, should the civilian elect to maintain on its military lines the branch that he had taken over, he sometimes turned out to be an asset. When the new broom adopted the plan of picking out the best men on the existing staff, of giving those preferred a couple of steps in rank, of providing them with large numbers of assistants, and of housing the result in some spacious edifice or group of edifices especially devised for the purpose, he sometimes contrived to develop what had been an efficient organization before into a still more efficient one. In that case the spirit of the branch remained, it carried on as a military institution but with a free hand and with extended liberty of action and the public service benefited although the cost was considerably greater. But that was not always the procedure decided upon.

Whatever procedure was decided upon, every care was taken to advertise. Advertisement is an art that the Man of Business thoroughly understands, and as to which he has little to learn even from the politician with a Press syndicate at his back. Soldiers are deplorably apathetic in this respect. It will hardly be believed that during the war the military department charged with works and construction often left the immediate supervision of the creation of some set of buildings in the hands of a single foreman of works, acting under an officer of Royal Engineers who only paid a visit daily as he would have several other duties of the same nature to perform. But if that set of buildings under construction came to be transferred to a civilian department or branch the Ministry of Munitions, let us say a large staff of supervisors of all kinds was at once introduced. Offices for them to carry on their supervisory duties in were erected. The thing was done in style, employment was given to a number of worthy people at the public expense, and it is quite possible that the supervisory duties were carried on no less efficiently than they had previously been by the foreman of works, visited daily by the officer of Royal Engineers.

From the outbreak of war and for nearly two years afterwards, the headquarters administration of the supply branch of our armies in all theatres except Mesopotamia and East Africa was carried out at the War Office by one director, five military assistants and some thirty clerks, together with one “permanent official” civilian aided by half-a-dozen assistants and about thirty clerks. It administered and controlled and supervised the obtaining and distribution of all requirements in food and forage, as also of fuel, petrol, disinfectants, and special hospital comforts, not only for the armies in the field but also for the troops in the United Kingdom. This meant an expenditure which by the end of the two years had increased to about half a million sterling per diem. Affiliated to this branch, as being under the same director, was the headquarters administration of the military-transport service, consisting of some fifteen military assistants and fifty or sixty clerks. The military transport service included a personnel of fully 300,000 officers and men, and the branch was charged with the obtaining of tens of thousands of motor vehicles of all kinds and of the masses of spare parts needed to keep them in working order, together with many other forms of transport material. The whole of these two affiliated military branches of the War Office could have been accommodated comfortably on one single floor of the Hotel Metropole! Well has it been said that soldiers have no imagination.

There were four especial branches under me to which some reference ought to be made. Of two of them little was, in the nature of things, heard during the war; these two were secret service branches, the one obtaining information with regard to the enemy, the other preventing the enemy from receiving information with regard to us. Of the other two, one dealt with the cable censorship and the other with the postal censorship. The Committee of Imperial Defence has been taken to task in some ill-informed quarters because of that crying lack of sufficient land forces and of munitions of certain kinds which made itself apparent when the crisis came upon us. It was, however, merely a consultative and not an executive body. It had no hold over the purse-strings. Shortcomings in these respects were the fault not of the Committee of Imperial Defence but of the Government of the day. On the other hand, the Committee did splendid work in getting expert sub-committees to compile regulations that were to be brought into force in each Government department on the outbreak of war compiling regulations cost practically nothing. Moreover, thanks to its representations and to its action, organizations were created in peace-time for prosecuting espionage in time of war and for ensuring an effective system of contre-espionage; these were under the control of the Director of Military Operations, and were the two secret branches referred to above.

About the former nothing can appropriately be disclosed. So much interesting information about the latter has appeared in German Spies at Bay that little need be said about it, except to repeat what has already appeared in that volume the branch had already achieved a notable triumph more than a fortnight before our Expeditionary Force fired a shot and some hours before the Royal Navy brought off their first success. For the whole enemy spy system within the United Kingdom was virtually laid by the heels within twenty-four hours of the declaration of war. Every effort to set it up afresh subsequently was nipped in the bud before it could do mischief.

One point, however, deserves to be placed on record. The disinclination of H.M. Government to announce the execution of the first enemy agent to meet his fate, Lodi, was one of the most extraordinary incidents that came to my knowledge in connection with enemy spies. Lodi was an officer, or ex-officer, and a brave man who in the service of his country had gambled with his life as the stake and had lost. He had fully acknowledged the justice of his conviction. All who were acquainted with the facts felt sympathy for him, although there could, of course, be no question of not carrying out the inevitable sentence of the court-martial. And yet our Government wanted to hush the whole thing up. They did not seem to realize that the shooting of a spy does not, when the spy is an enemy, mean punishment for a crime, that it represents a penalty which has to be inflicted as a deterrent, and which if it is to fulfil its purpose must be made known. Those of us who knew the facts were greatly incensed at the most improper, and indeed fatuous, attitude which the Executive for a time took up. What made them change their minds I do not know.

Then there was the cable censorship, an organization which did admirable work and got little thanks for it. The personnel consisted largely of retired officers, and many of them broke down under the prolonged strain. The potentialities of the cable censorship had not been fully foreseen when it was automatically established on mobilization, and of what it accomplished the general public know practically nothing at all. The conception of this institution had at the outset merely been that of setting up a barrier intended to prevent naval and military information that was calculated to be of service to the enemy from passing over the wires, whether in cipher or in clear. But an enterprising, prescient, and masterful staff perceived ere long that their powers could be developed and turned to account in other directions with advantage to the State, notably in that of stifling the commercial activities of the Central Powers in the Western Hemisphere. The consequence was that within a very few months the cable censorship had transformed itself to a great extent out of an effective shield for defence into a potent weapon of attack. The measure of its services to the country will never be known, as some of its procedure cannot perhaps advantageously be disclosed. Its labours were unadvertised, and its praises remained unsung. But those who were behind the scenes are well aware of what it accomplished, creeping along unseen tracks, to bring about the downfall of the Hun.

The postal censorship started as a branch of comparatively modest dimensions; but it gradually developed into a huge department, employing a personnel which necessarily included large numbers of efficient linguists. The remarkable success achieved by the contre-espionage service in preventing the re-establishment of the enemy spy system after it had been smashed at the start was in no small degree due to the work of the censorship. That the requisite number of individuals well acquainted with some of the outlandish lingoes which had to be grappled with proved to be forthcoming, is a matter of surprise and a subject for congratulation. This was not a case merely of French, German, Italian, and languages more or less familiar to our educated and travelled classes. Much of the work was in Scandinavian and in occult Slav tongues, a good deal of it not even written in the Roman character. The staff was largely composed, it should be mentioned, of ladies, some of them quite young; but young or old no, that won’t do, for ladies are never old quite young or only moderately young, they took to the work like ducks to the water and did yeoman service. As in the case of the cable censorship, employment in the postal censorship was a thankless job; but the labourers of both sexes in the branch had at least the satisfaction of knowing that they had done their bit some of them a good deal more than their bit for their country in its hour of trial.

Reference was made in the last chapter to certain discussions which took place in the winter of 1914-15 on the subject of suggested conjunct naval and military operations on the Flanders coast. The possibility of such undertakings was never entirely lost sight of during 1915, although the diversion of considerable British forces to far-off theatres of war necessarily enhanced the difficulties that stood in the way of a form of project which had much to recommend it from the strategical point of view. Our hosts on the Western Front were absolutely dependent upon the security of the Narrow Seas, and that security was being menaced owing to the enemy having laid his grip upon Ostend and Zeebrugge. One afternoon in the autumn of 1915 Admiral Bacon of the Dover Patrol, who believed in an extremely active defence, came to see me and we had a long and interesting conversation. He was full of a scheme for running some ship-loads of troops right into Ostend harbour at night and landing the men by surprise about the mole and the docks. His plans were not, however, at this time worked out so elaborately, nor had such effective preparations been taken in hand with regard to them, as was the case at a later date after Sir D. Haig had taken up command of the B.E.F. The Admiral describes these preparations and his developed plans in The Dover Patrol.

On the occasion of this talk in the War Office, Admiral Bacon was, if I recollect aright, contemplating landing the troops straight off the ordinary type of vessel, not off craft especially designed and constructed for the particular purpose, as was intended in his improved project. Nor was it, I think, proposed to use “beetles” (these may perhaps all have gone to the Mediterranean). My impression at the time was that the scheme had very much to recommend it in principle, but that its execution as it stood must represent an extremely hazardous operation of war. Nor was this a moment when one felt much leaning towards new-fangled tactical and strategical devices, for we had a large force locked up under most depressing conditions in the Gallipoli Peninsula, we were apparently going to be let in for trouble in Macedonia, and, although the United Kingdom and the Dominions had by this time very large forces under arms, a considerable proportion of the troops could hardly be looked upon as efficient owing to lack of training.

Looking at this question of the Flanders littoral from what, in a naval and military sense, may be called the academical point of view, it is certainly a great pity that neither the project worked out by Admiral Bacon in the winter of 1915-16 in agreement with G.H.Q., nor yet the later plan for conjunct operations to take place in this coast region had the Passchendael offensive of 1917 not been so disastrously delayed, was put into execution. Had either of them actually been carried out this must, whatever the result was, have provided one of the most dramatic and remarkable incidents in the course of the Great War.

Passing reference has already been made to Sir Archie Murray’s assumption of the position of C.I.G.S. in October 1915, when he replaced the late Sir James Wolfe-Murray. Shrewd, indefatigable, of very varied experience, an excellent administrator and a man of such charming personality that he could always get the very best out of his subordinates, Sir James would have admirably filled any high, non-technical appointment within the War Office during the early part of the contest, other than that which he was suddenly called upon to take up on the death of Sir C. Douglas. Absolutely disinterested, his energies wholly devoted to the service of the State, compelling the respect, indeed the affection, of all of us who were under him in those troublous times, a more considerate chief, nor one whose opinion when you put a point to him you could accept with more implicit confidence, it would have been impossible to find. But for occupying the headship of the General Staff under the existing circumstances he lacked certain desirable qualifications. Although well acquainted with the principles that should govern the general conduct of war and no mean judge of such questions, he was not disposed by instinct to interest himself in the broader aspects of strategy and of military policy. His bent was rather to concern himself with the details. Somewhat cautious, nay diffident, by nature, he moreover shrank from pressing his views, worthy of all respect as they were, on others, and he was always guarded in expressing them even when invited to do so.

Dealing with a Secretary of State of Lord Kitchener’s temperament, reticence of this kind did not work. Lord K. liked you to say what you thought without hesitation, and, once he knew you, he never resented your giving an opinion even uninvited if you did so tactfully. As for the personnel who constitute War Councils and their like, it is not the habit of the politician to hide his light under a bushel, nor to recoil from laying down the law about any matter with which he has a bowing acquaintance. That an expert should sit mute when his own subject is in debate, surprises your statesman profoundly. That the expert should not be brimming over with a didactic and confident flow of words when he has been invited to promulgate his views, confounds your statesman altogether. General Wolfe-Murray never seemed to succeed in getting on quite the proper terms either with his immediate superior, the War Minister, or yet with the members of the Government included in the War Council and the Dardanelles Committee; and it was cruel luck that, with so fine a record in almost all parts of the world to look back upon, this most meritorious public servant should towards the close of his career have found himself unwillingly thrust into a position for which, as he foresaw himself when he assumed it, he was not altogether well suited.

Subsequent to returning from Russia, and very shortly after the loss of the Hampshire with Lord Kitchener and his party, I came to be for some weeks unemployed, afterwards taking up a fresh appointment one in connection with Russian supplies, which later developed into one covering supplies for all the Allies and to which reference will be made in a special chapter. But the result was that, as a retired officer, I ceased for the time being to be on the active list and became a gentleman at large. Thereby hangs a tale; because it was just at this juncture that I was asked by the Army Council to go into the question of papers which were to be presented to the House of Commons in connection with the Dardanelles Campaign. Badgered by inquisitive members of that assembly, Mr. Asquith had committed himself to the production of papers; and Mr. Churchill had got together a dossier dealing with his share in the affair, which was sent to me to consider, together with all the telegrams, and so forth, that bore on the operations and their prologue.

On examining all this stuff, it soon became manifest that the publication of any papers at all during the war, in connection with this controversial subject, was to be deprecated. Still, one recognized that the Prime Minister’s promise had to be fulfilled somehow; so the great object to be kept in view seemed to be to keep publication within the narrowest possible limits compatible with satisfying the curiosity of the people in Parliament. As a matter of fact, there were passages in some of the documents which Mr. Churchill proposed for production that must obviously be expunged, in view of Allies’ susceptibilities and of their conveying information which might still be of value to the enemy. There could be no question that, no matter how drastic might be the cutting-down process, the Admiralty, the War Office and the Government would come badly out of the business. Furthermore, any publication of papers must make known to the world that Lord Kitchener’s judgement in connection with this particular phase of the war had been somewhat at fault.

When asking me to take the matter up, the Army Council had probably overlooked my civilian status or forgotten what a strong position this placed me in. An ex-soldier does not often get an opportunity of enjoying an official heart-to-heart talk, on paper, with the powers-that-be in the War Office. My report was to the effect that it was undesirable to produce any papers at all during the war, but that, as some had to be produced, they ought to be cut down to a minimum, that everybody official concerned in the business at home would be more or less shown up, that this was particularly unfortunate just at this time in view of Lord Kitchener’s lamented death, that the papers must be limited to those bearing upon the period antecedent to the actual landing of the army in the Gallipoli Peninsula, that if this last proviso was accepted I would go fully into the question and report in detail, and that if the proviso was not accepted I declined to act and they might all go to the well, one did not quite put it in those words, but they would take it that way. The result was not quite what one had either expected or desired. The production-of-papers project was dropped, and the Dardanelles Commission was appointed instead.

Mr. Lloyd George had become Secretary of State for War by this time. He was full of zeal and of original ideas, nor had he any intention of being merely a “passenger.” He had, after the manner of new War Ministers, introduced a fresh personal entourage into the place, and a momentary panic, caused by the news that telephonic communications into and out of the place were passing in an unknown guttural language not wholly unlike German, was only allayed on its being ascertained that certain of his hangers-on conversed over the wires in Welsh. Besides being full of original ideas, the new Secretary of State was in a somewhat restless mood. He took so keen an interest in some wonderful scheme in connection with Russian railways (about which I was freely consulted) that he evidently was hankering after going on a mission to that part of the world himself. He no doubt believed that a visit from him would be an equivalent for the visit by Lord Kitchener which had been interrupted so tragically. To anybody who had recently been to Russia, such an idea was preposterous. Few who counted in the Tsar’s dominions had ever heard of the Right Honourable Gentleman at this time; Lord Kitchener’s name, on the other hand, had been known, and his personality had counted as an asset (as I knew from my own experience), from Tornea on the Lappland borders to the highlands of Erzerum. The project did not strike one as deserving encouragement, and I did what I could to damp it down unobtrusively.

It was nearly a year later than this, in the summer of 1917, that, owing to the horse of General Whigham, the Deputy C.I.G.S., slipping up with him near the Marble Arch and giving him a nasty fall, he became incapacitated for a month. Sir W. Robertson thereupon called me in to act as locum tenens. From many points of view this proved to be a particularly edifying and instructive experience. One could not fail to be impressed with the smoothness with which the military side of the War Office was working under the system which Sir William had introduced, and one furthermore found oneself behind the scenes in respect to the progress of the war and to numbers of matters only known to the very few.

The plan under which nearly all routine work in connection with the General Staff, work that the C.I.G.S. would otherwise be obliged to concern himself with personally to a large extent, was delegated to a Deputy who was a Member of the Army Council was an admirable arrangement. It worked almost to perfection as far as I could see. It allowed Sir W. Robertson, in consultation with his Directors of Military Operations and of Intelligence, Generals Maurice and Macdonogh, to devote his attention to major questions embracing the conduct of the war on land as a whole. The Deputy in the meantime wrestled with the details, with the correspondence about points of secondary importance, in fact with the red tape if you like to call it that, while keeping in close and constant touch with the administrative departments and branches. Everybody advocates de-centralization in theory; Sir William actually carried it out in practice, reminding me of that Prince of military administrators, the late Sir H. Brackenbury. The Deputy’s room opened off that of the C.I.G.S.; but on many days I never even saw him except when he looked in for a minute to ask if I had anything for him, or when I happened to walk home some part of the way to York House with him after the trouble was over for the day.

It was intensely interesting to have the daily reports of casualties at the Western Front passing through one’s hands, and to note the extent to which these mounted up on what might be called non-fighting days as compared to days of attack. As this was during the opening stages of the Flanders offensive subsequent to General Plumer’s victory at Messines, these statistics were extremely instructive. I do not know whether the details have ever been worked out for the years 1915-17, but it looked to me at that time as if the losses in three weeks of ordinary trench-warfare came on the average to about the same total as did the losses in a regular formal assault of some section of the enemy’s lines. Or, putting the thing in another form and supposing the above calculation to be correct, you would in three weeks of continuous attack in a given zone only lose the same number of men as you would lose in that same zone in a year of stagnant, unprofitable trench-warfare. Some of our offensives on the Western Front have been condemned on the grounds of their costliness in human life; but it has not been sufficiently realized in the country how heavy the losses were during periods of quiescence.

As acting D.C.I.G.S. one, moreover, enjoyed opportunities of examining the various compiled statements showing the numbers of our forces in the various theatres, with full information as to the strength of our Allies’ armies in all quarters, as well as the carefully prepared estimates of the enemy’s fighting resources as these were arrived at by our Intelligence organizations in consultation with those of the French, Italians, Belgians, and others. One learnt the full details of our “order of battle” for the time being, exactly where the different divisions, army corps, etc., were located, and who commanded them. It transpired that the Entente host on the Salonika Front at this time comprised no fewer than 655,000 of all ranks, without counting in the Serbs who would have brought the total up to about 800,000, while the enemy forces opposed to them were calculated to muster only about 450,000; the situation was, in fact, much worse than one had imagined. One discovered that, while slightly over 17 per cent of the male population of Great Britain had been enrolled as soldiers, only 5 per cent of the Irish male population had come forward, and that but for north-east Ulster the figure would not have reached 3 per cent. One became aware, moreover, that the Army Council, or at least its Military Members, were at loggerheads with the War Cabinet over the problem of man-power, and that this question was from the military point of view giving grounds for grave anxiety.

In one of my drawers there was the first draft of a [] secret paper on this subject, which expressed the views of the Military Members of the Council in blunt terms, and which amounted in reality to a crushing indictment of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. I have a copy of the draft in my possession, but as it was a secret document it would be improper to give details of its contents; it, moreover, was somewhat modified and mellowed in certain particulars before the paper was actually sent to Downing Street. The final discussion took place at a full meeting of the Army Council while I was acting as D.C.I.G.S., but which I did not attend as not being a statutory member of that body. Parliament ought to call for this paper; it was presented in July 1917; it practically foreshadowed what actually occurred in March 1918. The Military Members of the Council nearly resigned in a body over this business; but they were not unanimous on the question of resignation, although perfectly unanimous as regards the seriousness of the position. It may be mentioned that at a considerably later date the Army Council did, including its civilian members, threaten resignation as a body when Sir N. Macready gave up the position of Adjutant-General to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, owing to an attempt made from Downing Street to civilianize the Adjutant-General’s department. The Army Council beat Downing Street, hands down.

The disquieting conditions in respect to man-power were, incidentally, hampering the development of two important combatant branches at this time, the Machine-Gun Corps and the Tank Corps. The heavy demands of these two branches, coupled with the fact that infantry wastage was practically exceeding the intake of recruits, threatened a gradual disappearance of the principal arm of the Service. We had by this time got long past the stage with which, when D.M.O., I had been familiar, where lack of material and munitions was checking the growth of our armies in the field. We had arrived at the stage where material and munitions were ample, but where it was becoming very difficult to maintain our armies in the field from lack of personnel a state of things directly attributable to the Government’s opportunist, hand-to-mouth policy in the matter, and to their disinclination to insist upon practically the whole of the younger categories of male adults joining the colours. The organization of the Tank Corps was finally decided actually while I was acting as D.C.I.G.S. In so far as the general control of Tank design and the numbers of these engines of war to be turned out was concerned, it seemed to me to be a case of “pull devil, pull baker” between the military and the civilians as to how far these matters were to be left entirely to the technicalist; but the technicalist was not perhaps getting quite so much to say in the matter as was reasonable. The personal factor maybe entered into the question.

When the War Office had been reconstituted by the Esher Committee in 1904, the Admiralty organization had been to a great extent taken as a model for the Army Council arrangement which the triumvirate then introduced. Thirteen years later the Admiralty was reorganized, and on this occasion the War Office system of 1904, as modified and developed in the light of experience in peace and in war, was taken as the model for the rival institution. Whigham had played a part in the carrying out of this important reform, lending his advice to the sailors and explaining the distribution of duties amongst the higher professional authorities on our side of Whitehall, especially in connection with the General Staff. The most urgently needed alteration to be sought after was the relieving of the First Sea Lord of a multitude of duties which were quite incompatible with his giving full attention to really vital questions in connection with employing the Royal Navy. For years past he had been a sort of Pooh Bah, holding a position in some respects analogous to that occupied by Lord Wolseley and Lord Roberts when they had been nominally “Commander-in-chief” of the army. Under the arrangements made with the assistance of the War Office in 1917, a post somewhat analogous to that of D.C.I.G.S. was set up at the Admiralty, and the First Sea Lord was thenceforward enabled to see to the things that really mattered as he never had been before. Although the amount of current work to be got through daily when acting as Deputy C.I.G.S. proved heavy enough during the month when I was locum tenens, it was not so heavy as to preclude my looking through the instructive documents dealing with this matter amongst Whigham’s papers.

The glorious uncertainty of cricket is acknowledged to be one of the main attractions of our national game. But the glorious uncertainty of cricket is as nothing compared to the glorious uncertainty which obtains in time of war as to what silly thing H.M. Government or some of its shining lights will be wanting to do next. At this time the War Cabinet, or perhaps one ought rather to say certain members of that body, had got it into their heads that to send round a lot of Sir Douglas Haig’s troops (who were pretty well occupied as it was) to the Isonzo Front would be a capital plan, the idea being to catch the Central Powers no end of a “biff” in this particular quarter. That fairly banged Banagher. For sheer fatuity it was the absolute limit.

Ever since the era of Hannibal, if not indeed since even earlier epochs, trampling, hope-bestirred armies have from generation to generation been bursting forth like a pent-up torrent from that broad zone of tumbled Alpine peaks which overshadows Piedmont, Lombardy and Venetia, to flood their smiling plains with hosts of fighting men. Who ever heard of an army bursting in the opposite direction? Napoleon tried it, and rugged, thrusting Suvorof; but they did not get much change out of it. The mountain region has invariably either been in possession of the conquerors at the start, or else it has been acquired by deliberate, protracted process during the course of a lengthy struggle, before the dramatic coup has been delivered by which the levels have been won. The wide belt of highlands extending from Switzerland to Croatia remained in the enemy’s hands up to the time of the final collapse of the Dual Monarchy subsequent to the rout of the Emperor Francis’ legions on the Piave. The Italians had in the summer of 1917 for two years been striving to force their way into these mountain fastnesses, and they had progressed but a very few miles. They had not only been fighting the soldiery of the Central Powers, but had also been fighting Nature. Nature often proves a yet more formidable foe than do swarms of warriors, even supposing these to be furnished with all modern requirements for prosecuting operations in the field.

Roads are inevitably few and far between in a mountainous region. In such terrain, roads and railways can be destroyed particularly easily and particularly effectively by a retiring host. In this kind of theatre, troops can only quit the main lines of communications with difficulty, and localities abound where a very inferior force will for a long time stay the advance of much more imposing columns. You can no more cram above a given number of men on to a certain stretch of road when on the move, than you can get a quart into a pint pot. Even if your enemy simply falls back without fighting, destroying all viaducts, tunnels, embankments, culverts, and so forth, your army will take a long time to traverse the highlands unless it be an uncommonly small one. Armies in these days are inevitably of somewhat bloated dimensions if they are to do any good. Theatrical strategy of the flags-on-the-map order is consequently rather at a discount in an arena such as the War Cabinet, or some members of that body, proposed to exploit. Even had there been no other obvious objections to a diversion of force such as they contemplated, the project ignored certain elementary aspects of the conduct of warlike operations which might be summed up in the simple expression “common-sense.”

But there were other obvious objections. To switch any force worth bothering about from northern France to the Friuli flats was bound to be a protracted process, because only two railways led over the Alps from Dauphiné and Provence into the basin of the Po; and those lines were distinguished for their severe gradients. It was, as a matter of fact, incomparably easier for the enemy to mass reinforcements in the Julian Alps than it was for the two Western Powers to mass reinforcements in the low ground facing that great area of rugged hills. The question of a transfer of six divisions from the Western Front to Venetia had, however, been gone into very thoroughly by the General Staff in view of conceivable eventualities. An elaborate scheme had been drawn up by experienced officers, who had examined the question in consultation with the Italian military authorities, and had traversed the communications that would have to be brought into play were such a move to be carried out. What time the transfer would take was a matter of calculation based on close examination of the details. The final report came to hand while I was acting as Deputy C.I.G.S., although its general purport had already been communicated several weeks before. Two or three months later, when it suddenly became necessary to rush British and French troops round from northern France to the eastern portions of the Po basin after the singular debacle of Caporetto, actual experience proved the forecasts made in this report to have been quite correct. There was not much “rushing” about the move. It took weeks to complete.

General Pershing and his staff arrived in England just at this time, and I enjoyed the pleasure of meeting them and discussing many matters. The attitude of these distinguished soldiers, one and all, impressed us most agreeably. One had heard something about “Yankee bounce” in the past, which exists no doubt amongst some of the citizens of the great Republic across the water. But here we found a body of officers who, while manifestly knowing uncommonly well what they were about, were bent on learning from us everything that they possibly could, and who from the outset proved themselves singularly ready to fall in with our methods of doing business even where those methods differed widely from what they had been accustomed to.

Some weeks later (in the capacity of War Office representative) I accompanied Lord Jellicoe and Admiral Sims, together with Sir I. Malcolm and Sir W. Wiseman of the Foreign Office, to Devonport to meet a large party of high officials from the United States who were coming over to Europe to take general charge of things in connection with the American share in the war. It was headed by Colonel House, and included the Chiefs of the Naval and Military Staffs with their assistants, as well as financial and other delegates. We arrived some time before the two cruisers conveying the party were due, so we proceeded to Admiralty House. While waiting there, one was afforded a most welcome opportunity of learning something about how the strings were being pulled over the great water-area which was under special charge of the local commander-in-chief. The whole thing was set out on a huge fixed map covering, I think, the billiard-table. On it were shown where the various convoys were at the moment, the minefields, the positions where German U-boats had recently been located, and numberless other important details. To a landsman it was absorbingly interesting to have all this explained, just as it had been interesting, a few days before, to visit General Ashmore’s office at the Horse Guards and to learn on the map how the London anti-aircraft defences were controlled during an attack.

Just about dusk the two cruisers were descried coming in past the breakwater, so it became a question of getting to the Keyham dockyard where they were to fetch up. Ever keen for exercise in any form, Lord Jellicoe decided to walk, and the commander-in-chief went with him. Knowing the distance and the somewhat unattractive approaches leading to the Keyham naval establishments, and as it, moreover, looked and felt uncommonly like rain, I preferred to wait and to proceed in due course by car, as did all the rest of our party. The flag-lieutenant and the naval officer who had come down with Lord Jellicoe from the Admiralty likewise thought that a motor was good enough for them. By the time that the automobile party reached the dockyard it was pitch dark and pouring rain, and the cruisers were already reported as practically alongside; but to our consternation there was no sign of the two flag-officers. Now, a dog who has lost his master is an unperturbed, torpid, contented creature compared with a flag-lieutenant who has lost his admiral, and there was a terrible to-do. All the telephones were buzzing and ringing, the dockyard police were eagerly interrogated, and there was already talk of despatching search-parties, when the two distinguished truants suddenly turned up, exceedingly hot, decidedly wet, and, if the truth must be told, looking a little muddy and bedraggled. However, there was no time to be lost, and we all rushed off into the night heading for where the vessels were to berth. How we did not break our necks tumbling into a dry-dock or find a watery grave tumbling into a wet one, I do not know. We certainly most of us barked our shins against anchors, chains, bollards, and every sort of pernicious litter such as the sister service loves to fondle, and the language would have been atrocious had we not been out of breath the Foreign Office indeed contrived to be explosive even as it was. However, we managed to reach the jetty after all just as the two big warships had been warped alongside, winning by a nose. So all was well.

Colonel House and his party had not been fortunate in their weather during the crossing, and they had come to the conclusion that a fighting ship represented an overrated form of ocean liner. More than one of the soldiers and civilians confided to me that if there was no other way of getting across the herring-pond on the way back than by cruiser, they would stop this side. They were all quite pleased to find themselves on dry land, and during the journey up to town by special there was plenty of time to make acquaintance and to discuss general questions. One point was made plain. Mr. Balfour’s recently concluded mission to the United States had been a tremendous success. Junior officers who had not met him spoke of him almost with bated breath, and a hint that he might be at the terminus to greet the party caused unbounded satisfaction. When we steamed into Paddington about 1 o’clock A.M. and his tall figure was descried on the platform, the whole crowd burst out of the train in a disorderly swarm, jostling each other in trying to get near him and have a chance of shaking his hand; it was quite a business getting them sorted and under control again so as to start them off in the waiting cars to Claridge’s. We do not always send the right man as envoy to foreign parts, but we had managed it that time.