Chapter 27

SOME EXPERIENCES IN THE WAR OFFICE

A reversion to earlier dates -- The statisticians in the winter of 1914-15 -- The efforts to prove that German man-power would shortly give out -- Lack of the necessary premises upon which to found such calculations -- Views on the maritime blockade -- The projects for operations against the Belgian coast district in the winter of 1914-15 -- Nature of my staff -- The "dug-outs" -- The services of one of them, "Z" -- His care of me in foreign parts -- His activities in other Departments of State -- An alarming discovery -- How "Z" grappled with a threatening situation -- He hears about the Admiralty working on the Tanks -- The cold-shouldering of Colonel Swinton when he raised this question at the War Office in January 1915 -- Lord Fisher proposes to construct large numbers of motor-lighters, and I am told off to go into the matter with him -- The Baltic project -- The way it was approached -- Meetings with Lord Fisher -- The "beetles" -- Visits from the First Sea Lord -- The question of secrecy in connection with war operations -- A parable -- The land service behind the sea service in this matter -- Interviews with Mr. Asquith -- His ways on such occasions.

These random jottings scarcely lend themselves to the scrupulous preservation of a chronological continuity. Many other matters meriting some mention as affecting the War Office had claimed one's attention before the Dardanelles campaign finally fizzled out early in January 1916. The General Staff had to some extent been concerned in the solutions arrived at by the Entente during the year 1915 of those acutely complex problems which kept arising in the Balkans. Then, again, quite a number of "side-shows" had been embarked on at various dates since the outbreak of the conflict, of which some had been carried through to a successful conclusion to the advantage of the cause, while the course of others had been of a decidedly chequered character. The munitions question, furthermore, which had for a time caused most serious difficulty but which had been disposed of in great measure by the end of 1915 owing to the foresight and the labours of Lord Kitchener and of the Master-General of the Ordnance's Department, was necessarily one in which the Military Operations Directorate was deeply interested. These and a number of other matters will be dealt with in special chapters, but some more or less personal experiences in and around Whitehall may appropriately be placed on record here.

Already, early in the winter of 1914-15, the statisticians were busily at work. They had found a bone and they were gnawing at it to their heart's content. Individuals of indisputable capacity and of infinite application set themselves to work to calculate how soon Boche man-power would be exhausted. Lord Haldane hurled himself into the breach with a zest that could hardly have been exceeded had he been contriving a totally new Territorial Army organization. Professor Oman abandoned Wellington somewhere amidst the declivities of the sierras without one qualm, and immersed himself in computations warranted to make the plain man's hair stand on end. The enthusiasts who voluntarily undertook this onerous task arrived at results of the most encouraging kind, for one learnt that the Hun as a warrior would within quite a short space of time be a phantom of the past, that adult males within the Kaiser's dominions would speedily comprise only the very aged, the mentally afflicted or the maimed wreckage from the battlefields of France and Poland, and that if this attractive Sovereign proposed to continue hostilities he must ere long, as Lincoln said of Jefferson Davis, "rob the cradle and the grave." Even Lord Kitchener displayed some interest in these mathematical exercises, and was not wholly unimpressed when figures established the gratifying fact that the German legions were a vanishing proposition. I was always in this matter graded in the "doubting Thomas" class.

The question seemed to base itself upon what premises you thought fit to start from. You could no doubt calculate with some certainty upon the total number of Teuton males of fighting age being somewhere about fifteen millions in August 1914, upon 700,000, or so, youths annually reaching the age of eighteen, and upon Germany being obliged to have under arms continually some five million soldiers. After that you were handling rather indeterminate factors. You might put down indispensables in civil life at half a million or at four millions just as you liked; but it made the difference of three and a half millions in your pool to start with, according to which estimate you preferred. After that you had to cut out the unfit--another problematical figure. Finally came the question of casualties based on suspicious enemy statistics, and the perplexities involved in the number of wounded who would, and who would not, be able to return to the ranks. The only conclusion that one seemed to be justified in arriving at was that the wastage was in excess of the intake of youngsters, that the outflow was greater than the inflow, and that if the war went on long enough German man-power would give out. When that happy consummation would be arrived at, it was in the winter of 1914-15 impossible to say and fruitless to take a shot at.

The Director of Military Operations received copies of most Foreign Office telegrams as a matter of course, and during the early months of the war many of these documents as they came to hand were found to be concerned with that very ticklish question, the maritime blockade. The attitude taken up by those responsible in this country regarding this matter has been severely criticized in many quarters, certain organs of the Press were loud in their condemnation of our kid-glove methods in those days, and the Sister Service seemed to be in discontented mood. But there was a good deal to be said on the other side. Lack of familiarity with international law, with precedents, and with the tenour and result of the discussions which had at various times taken place with foreign countries over the manners and customs of naval blockade, made any conclusions which I might arrive at over so complex a problem of little profit. But it always did seem to me that the policy actually adopted was in the main the right one, and that to have bowed before advocates of more drastic measures might well have landed us in a most horrible mess. You can play tricks with neutrals whose fighting potentialities are restricted, which you had better not try on with non-belligerents who may be able to make things hot for you. The progress of the war in the early months was not so wholly reassuring as to justify hazarding fresh complications.

In his book, "_1914_," Lord French has dealt at some length with an operations question which was much in debate during the winter of 1914-15. He and Mr. Churchill were at this time bent on joint naval and military undertakings designed to recover possession of part, or of the whole, of the Belgian coast-line--in itself a most desirable objective. Although I did not see most of the communications which passed between the French Government and ours on the subject, nor those which passed between Lord Kitchener and the Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F., I gathered the nature of what was afoot from Sir J. Wolfe Murray and Fitzgerald, as also from G.H.Q. in France, and examined the problem which was involved with the aid of large-scale maps and charts and such other information as was available. The experts of St. Omer did not appear to accept the scheme with absolutely whole-hearted concurrence. By some of them--it may have been a mistaken impression on my part--the visits of the First Lord of the Admiralty to their Chief hardly seemed to be welcomed with the enthusiasm that might have been expected. Whisperings from across the Channel perhaps made one more critical than one ought to have been, but, be that as it may, the project hardly struck one as an especially inviting method of employing force at that particular juncture. We were deplorably short of heavy howitzers, and we were already feeling the lack of artillery ammunition of all sorts. Although some reinforcements--the Twenty-Seventh and Twenty-Eighth Divisions--were pretty well ready to take the field, no really substantial augmentation of our fighting forces on the Western Front was to be anticipated for some months. The end was attractive enough, but the means appeared to be lacking.

In long-range--or, for the matter of that, short-range--bombardments of the Flanders littoral by warships I placed no trust. Mr. Churchill's "we could give you 100 or 200 guns from the sea in absolutely devastating support" of the 22nd of November to Sir J. French would not have excited me in the very least. In his book, the Field-Marshal ascribes the final decision of our Government to refuse sanction to a plan of operations which they had approved of at the first blush, partly to French objections and partly to the sudden fancy taken by the War Council for offensive endeavour in far-distant fields. That may be the correct explanation; but it is also possible that after careful consideration of the subject Lord Kitchener perceived the tactical and strategical weakness of the plan in itself.

My staff was from the outset a fairly substantial one--much the largest of that in any War Office Directorate--and, although I am no great believer in a multitudinous personnel swarming in a public office, it somehow grew. It was composed partly of officers and others whom I found on arrival, partly of new hands brought in automatically on mobilization like myself to fill the places of picked men who had been spirited away with the Expeditionary Force, and partly of individuals acquired later on as other regular occupants were received up into the framework of the growing fighting forces of the country. A proportion of the new-comers were dug-outs, and it may not be out of place to say a word concerning this particular class of officer as introduced into the War Office, of whom I formed one myself. Instigated thereunto by that gushing fountain of unimpeachable information, the Press, the public were during the early part of the war disposed to attribute all high crimes and misdemeanours, of which the central administration of the nation's military forces was pronounced to have been guilty, to the "dug-out." That the personnel of the War Office was always set out in detail at the beginning of the _Monthly Army List_, the omniscient Fourth Estate was naturally aware; but the management of a newspaper could hardly be expected to purchase a copy (it was not made confidential for a year). Nor could a journalistic staff condescend to study this work of reference at some library or club. Under the circumstances, and having heard that such people as "dug-outs" actually existed, the Press as a matter of course assumed that within the portals in Whitehall Lord Kitchener was struggling in vain against the ineptitude and reactionary tendencies of a set of prehistoric creatures who constituted the whole of his staff. The fact, however, was that all the higher appointments (with scarcely an exception other than that of myself) were occupied by soldiers who had been on the active list at the time of mobilization, and the great majority of whom simply remained at their posts after war was declared.

Nor were "dug-outs," whether inside or outside of the War Office, by necessity and in obedience to some inviolable rule individuals languishing in the last stage of mental and bodily decay. Some of them were held to be not too effete to bear their burden even amid the stress and turmoil of the battlefield. One, after serving with conspicuous distinction in several theatres of war, finished up as Chief of the General Staff and right-hand man to Sir Douglas Haig in 1918. Those members of the band who were at my beck and call within the War Office generally contrived to grapple effectually with whatever they undertook, and amongst them certainly not the least competent and interesting was a Rip Van Winkle, whom we will call "Z"--for short.

A subaltern at the start, "Z" was fitted out with all the virtues of the typical subaltern, but was furnished in addition with certain virtues that the typical subaltern does not necessarily possess. It could not be said of him that

deep on his brow engraven Deliberation sat and sovereign care,

but he treated Cabinet Ministers with an engaging blend of firmness and familiarity, and he could, when occasion called for it, keep Royalty in its place. Once when he thought fit to pay a visit on duty to Paris and the front, he took me with him, explaining that unless he had a general officer in his train there might be difficulties as to his being accompanied by his soldier servant. Generals and colonels and people of that kind doing duty at the War Office did not then have soldier servants--but "Z" did. It is, however, bare justice to him to acknowledge that, after I had served his purpose and when he came to send me back to England from Boulogne before he resumed his inspection of troops and trenches, he was grandmotherly in his solicitude that I should meet with no misadventure. "Have you got your yellow form all right, sir? You'd better look. No, no; that's not it, that's another thing altogether. Surely you haven't lost it already! Ah, that's it. Now, do put it in your right-hand breast pocket, where you won't get it messed up with your pocket-handkerchief, sir, and remember where it is." It reminded one of being sent off as a small boy to school.

It was his practice to make a round of the different Public Departments of a forenoon, and to draw the attention of those concerned in each of them to any matters that appeared to him to call for comment. The Admiralty and the Foreign Office naturally engaged his attention more than others, but he was a familiar figure in them all. His activities were so varied indeed that they almost might have been summed up as universal, which being the case, it is not perhaps altogether to be wondered at that he did occasionally make a mistake. For instance:

He burst tumultuously into my room one morning flourishing a paper. "Have you seen this, sir?" As a matter of fact I had seen it; but as the document had conveyed no meaning to my mind, dissembled. Its purport was that 580 tons of a substance of which I had never heard before, and of which I have forgotten the name, had been landed somewhere or other in Scandinavia. "But do you know what it is, sir? It's the most appalling poison! It's the concoction that the South Sea Islanders smear their bows and arrows with--cyanide and prussic acid are soothing-syrup compared to it. Of course it's for those filthy Boches. Five hundred and eighty tons of it! There won't be a bullet or a zeppelin or a shell or a bayonet or a dart or a strand of barbed-wire that won't be reeking with the stuff." I was aghast. "Shall I go and see the Director-General, A.M.S., about it, sir?"

"Yes, do, by all means. The very thing."

He came back presently. "I've seen the D.-G., sir, and he's frightfully excited. He's got hold of all his deputies and hangers-on, and the whole gang of them are talking as if they were wound up. One of them says he thinks he has heard of an antidote, but of course he knows nothing whatever about it really, and is only talking through his hat, I tell you what, sir, we ought to lend them a hand in this business. I know Professor Stingo; he's miles and away the biggest man on smells and that sort of thing in London, if not in Europe. So, if you'll let me, I'll charter a taxi and be off and hunt him up, and get him to work. If the thing can be done, sir, he's the lad for the job. May I go, sir?"

"Very well, do as you propose, and let me know the result."

He turned up again in the afternoon. "I've seen old man Stingo, sir, and he's for it all right. He's going to collect a lot more sportsmen of the same kidney, and they're going to have the time of their lives, and to make a regular night of it. You see, sir, I pointed out to him that this was a matter of the utmost urgency--not merely a question of finding an antidote, but also of distributing it methodically and broadcast. After it's been invented or made or procured, or whatever's got to be done, some comedian in the Quartermaster-General's show will insist on the result being packed up in receptacles warranted rot-proof against everything that the mind of man can conceive till the Day of Judgment--you know the absurd way those sort of people go on, sir--and all that will take ages, æons." He really thought of everything. "And there'll have to be books of instructions and classes, and the Lord knows what besides! After that the stuff'll have to be carted off to France and the Dardanelles, and maybe to Archangel and Mesopotamia; so Stingo and Co. are going to be up all night, and mean to arrive at some result or to perish in the attempt. And now, sir, what have you done about it at the Foreign Office?"

This was disconcerting, seeing that I had done nothing.

"Oh, but, sir," sounding that note of submissive expostulation which the tactful staff-officer contrives to introduce when he feels himself obliged reluctantly to express disapproval of superior military authority, "oughtn't we to do something? How would it be if I were to go down and see Grey, or one of them, and to talk to him like a father?"

"Well, perhaps it might be advisable to make a guarded suggestion to them on the subject. Give my compliments to ----" But he was gone.

He returned in about half an hour. "I've been down to the Foreign Office, sir, and as you might have expected, they haven't done a blooming thing. What those 'dips' think they're paid for always beats me! However, I've got them to promise to cable out to their ambassadors and consuls and bottle-washers in Scandinavia to keep their wits about them. I offered to draft the wires for them; but they seemed to think that they could do it themselves, and I daresay they'll manage all right now that I've told them exactly what they are to say. I really do not know that we can do anything more about it this evening," he added doubtfully, and with a worried, far-away look on his face. Good heavens, he was never going to think of something else! He took himself off, however, still evidently dissatisfied and communing with himself.

Next forenoon "Z" came into my room in a hurry. "I've been hearing about the caterpillars, sir," he exclaimed joyously.

"The caterpillars?"

"Oh, not crawly things like one finds in one's salad, sir. The ones the Admiralty are making[5]--armoured motor contrivances, with great big feet that will go across country and jump canals, and go bang through Boche trenches and barbed wire as if they weren't there. They'll be perfectly splendid--full of platoons and bombs and machine guns, and all the rest of it. I _will_ say this for Winston and those mariners across Whitehall, when they get an idea they carry it out and do not bother whether the thing'll be any use or can be made at all--care no more for the Treasury than if it was so much dirt, and quite right too! Just what it is. But when they've got their caterpillars made, they won't know what to do with them any more than the Babes in the Wood. Then we'll collar them; but in the meantime I might be able to give them some hints, so, if you'll let me, I'll go across and----"

[Footnote 5: The first I heard of the Tanks, which made so dramatic a debut near the Somme a year and a half later.]

"Yes, yes; but just one moment. How about the poison?"

"The poison, sir? What poi--oh, that stuff. Didn't I tell you, sir? It isn't poison at all. You see, sir, it's this way. There are two forms of it. There's the white form, and that _is_ poison, shocking poison; it's what the Fijians use when they want to pacify a busybody like Captain Cook who comes butting in where he isn't wanted. As a matter of fact there's uncommon little of it--they don't get a hundredweight in a generation. Then there's the red form, and that's what Johnnies have been dumping down 580 tons of at What's-its-name. It's quite innocuous, and is used for commercial purposes--tanning leather, or making spills, or something of that kind. Now may I go to the Ad----"

"But have you told all this to the Director-General?"

"Oh yes, sir. I told him first thing this morning."

"Did he pass no remarks as to your having started him off after this absurd hare of yours?"

"Well, you see, sir, he's an uncommonly busy man, and I didn't feel justified in wasting his time. So, after relieving his mind, I cleared out at once."

"And your professors?"

"Oh, those professor-men--it would never do to tell them, sir. They'd be perfectly miserable if they were deprived of the excitement of muddling about with their crucibles and blow-pipes and retorts and things. It would be cruelty to animals to enlighten them--it would indeed, sir; and I know that you would not wish me to do anything to discourage scientific investigation. Now, sir, may I go over to the Admiralty?" And off he went, with instructions to find out all that he could about these contrivances that he had heard about, and to do what he could to promote their production. A treasure: unconventional, resourceful, exceptionally well informed, determined; the man to get a thing done that one wanted done--even if he did at times get a thing done that one didn't particularly want done--and in some respects quite the best intelligence officer I have come across in a fairly wide experience. To-day "Z" commands the applause of listening senates in the purlieus of St. Stephen's and has given up to party what was meant for mankind; but although he is not Prime Minister yet, nor even a Secretary of State, that will come in due course.

It was in May 1915 that "Z" told me that the Admiralty were at work on some sort of land-ship, and set about finding out what was being done; he had previously been in communication with Colonel E. D. Swinton over at the front. Only in the latter part of 1919, when the question of claims in connection with the invention and the development of Tanks had been investigated by a Royal Commission, did I learn to my astonishment that this matter had been brought by Swinton before the War Office so early as the beginning of January 1915, and that his projects had then been "turned down" by a technical branch to which he had, unfortunately, referred them. It does not seem possible that the technical branch can have brought the question to the notice of the General Staff, or I must have heard of it. The value of some contrivance such as he was confident could be constructed was from the tactical point of view incontestable, and had been incontestable ever since trench warfare became the order of the day on the Western Front in the late autumn of 1914. But the idea of the land-ship appeared to be an idle dream, and there was perhaps some excuse for the General Staff in its not of its own accord pressing upon the technical people that something of the sort must be produced somehow. Knowledge that a thoroughly practical man possessed of engineering knowledge and distinguished for his prescience like Swinton was convinced that the thing was feasible, was just what was required to set the General Staff in motion.

Thanks to Swinton, and also to "Z," the General Staff did get into touch with the Admiralty in May, and then found that a good deal had already been done, owing to Mr. Churchill's imagination and foresight and to the energy and ingenuity with which the land-ship idea had been taken up at his instigation. But the War Office came badly out of the business, and the severe criticisms to which it has been exposed in connection with the subject are better deserved than a good many of the criticisms of which it has been the victim. The blunder was not perhaps so much the fault of individuals as of the system. The technical branches had not been put in their place before the war, they did not understand their position and did not realize that on broad questions of policy they were subject to the General Staff. It is worthy of note, incidentally, that Swinton never seems to have got much satisfaction with G.H.Q. in France until he brought his ideas direct before the General Staff out there on the 1st of June by submitting a memorandum to the Commander-in-Chief. It is to be hoped that the subserviency of all other branches to the General Staff in connection with matters of principle has been established once for all by this time; it was, I think, pretty well established by Sir W. Robertson when he became C.I.G.S. Should there ever be any doubt about the matter--well, remember the start of the Tanks!

One morning in January or February 1915, Lord K. sent for me to his room. It appeared that Lord Fisher had in mind a project of constructing a flotilla of lighters of special type, to be driven by motor power and designed for the express purpose of landing large bodies of troops rapidly on an enemy's coast. The First Sea Lord was anxious to discuss details with somebody from our side of Whitehall, and the Chief wished me to take the thing up, the whole business being of a most secret character. Lord Fisher, I gathered, contemplated descents upon German shores; Lord K. did not appear to take these very seriously, but he did foresee that a flotilla of the nature proposed might prove extremely useful in connection with possible future operations on the Flanders littoral. In any case, seeing that the Admiralty were prepared to undertake a construction job of this kind more or less in the interests of us soldiers, we ought to give the plan every encouragement.

Vague suggestions had reached me from across the road shortly before--I do not recollect exactly how they came to hand--to the effect that one ought to examine into the possibilities offered by military operations based on the German Baltic coast and against the Frisian Islands. Attacks upon these islands presented concrete problems; the question in their case had been already gone into carefully by other hands before the war, and schemes of this particular kind had not been found to offer much attraction when their details came to be considered. As for the Baltic coast, one was given nothing whatever to go upon--was groping in the dark. You wondered how it was proposed to obtain command of these protected waters, bearing in mind the nature of the approaches through defiles which happened to be in the main in neutral hands, but you realized that this was a naval question and therefore somebody else's job. Still, even given this command, what then? Investigations of the subject, based upon uncertain premises, did not lead to the conclusion that, beyond "containing" hostile forces which otherwise might be available for warfare in some other quarter, a landing in large force on these shores was likely to prove an effective operation of war; and it was bound to be an extremely hazardous one.

It has since transpired from Lord Fisher's volcanic _Memories_ that the First Sea Lord had, with his "own hands alone to preserve secret all arrangements," prepared plans for depositing three "great armies" at different places in the Baltic, "two of them being feints that could be turned into reality." How the First Sea Lord could draw up plans of this kind that were capable of being put into effective execution without some military assistance I do not pretend to understand. A venture such as this does not begin and end with dumping down any sort of army you like at a spot on the enemy's shores where it happens to be practicable to disembark troops rapidly. Once landed, the army still has to go ahead and do its business, whatever this is, as a military undertaking, and it stands in need of some definite and practicable objective. The numbers of which it is to consist and its detailed organization have to be worked out in advance, with a clear idea of what service it is intended to perform and of the strength of the enemy forces which it is likely to encounter while carrying out its purpose. It has to be fed and has to be supplied with war material after it has been deposited on _terra firma_. Is it to take its transport with it, or will it pick this up on arrival? Even the constitution of the armada which is to convey it to its point of disembarkation by no means represents a purely naval problem. Until the sailors know what the composition of the military force in respect to men, animals, vehicles, etc., is to be, they cannot calculate what tonnage will be required, or decide how that tonnage is to be allotted for transporting the troops oversea. For a project of this kind to be worked out solely by naval experts would be no less ridiculous than for it to be worked out solely by military experts. Secrecy in a situation of this kind is no doubt imperative, but you must trust somebody or you will head straight for catastrophe.

When I went over by appointment to see Lord Fisher, he got to work at once in that inimitable way of his. He explained that what he had in view was to place sufficient motor-lighters at Lord Kitchener's disposal, each carrying about 500 men, to land 50,000 troops on a beach at one time. He insisted upon the most absolute secrecy. What he wanted me to do was to discuss the construction of the lighters in detail with the admiral who had the job in charge, so as to ensure that their design would fall in with purely military requirements. I had, some sixteen years before when Lord Fisher had been Commander-in-Chief on the Mediterranean station, enjoyed a confidential discussion with him in Malta concerning certain strategical questions in that part of the world, and had been amazed at the alertness of his brain, his originality of thought, his intoxicating enthusiasm, and his relentless driving power. Now, in 1915, he seemed to be even younger than he had seemed then. He covered the ground at such a pace that I was speedily toiling breathless and dishevelled far in rear. It is all very well to carry off _Memories_ into a quiet corner and to try to assimilate limited portions of that work at a time, deliberately and in solitude. But to have a hotch-potch of Shakespeare, internal combustion engines, chemical devices for smoke screens, principles of the utilization of sea power in war, Holy Writ, and details of ship construction dolloped out on one's plate, and to have to bolt it then and there, imposes a strain on the interior economy that is greater than this will stand. After an interview with the First Sea Lord you suffered from that giddy, bewildered, exhausted sort of feeling that no doubt has you in thrall when you have been run over by a motor bus without suffering actual physical injury.

The main point that I insisted upon when in due course discussing the construction details of the motor-lighters with the admiral who was supervising the work, was that they should be so designed as to let the troops aboard of them rush out quickly as soon as the prow should touch the shore. The vessels were put together rapidly, and one or two of those first completed were experimented with in the Solent towards the end of April, when they were found quite satisfactory. Although they were never turned to account for the purpose which Lord Fisher had had in mind when the decision was taken to build them, a number of these mobile barges proved extremely useful to our troops in the later stages of the Dardanelles campaign, notably on the occasion of the landing at Suvla and while the final evacuations were being carried out. Indeed, but for the "beetles" (as the soldiers christened these new-fangled craft), our army would never have got away from the Gallipoli Peninsula with such small loss of stores and impedimenta as it did, and the last troops told off to leave Helles on the stormy night of the 8th-9th of January 1916 might have been unable to embark and might have met with a deplorable disaster.

After that first meeting with him at the Admiralty, I frequently saw Lord Fisher, and he kept me acquainted with his views on many points, notably on what was involved in the threat of the U-boats after Sir I. Hamilton had landed his troops in the Gallipoli Peninsula. On more than one occasion he honoured me with a surprise visit in my office. These interviews in my sanctum were of quite a dramatic, Harrison-Ainsworth, Gunpowder-Treason, Man-in-the-Iron-Mask character. He gave me no warning, scorning the normal procedure of induction by a messenger. He would appear of a sudden peeping in at the door to see if I was at home, would then thrust the door to and lock it on the inside with a deft turn of the wrist, would screw up the lean-to ventilator above the door in frantic haste, and would have darted over and be sitting down beside me, talking earnestly and _ventre-à-terre_ of matters of grave moment, almost before I could rise to my feet and conform to those deferential observances that are customary when a junior officer has to deal with one of much higher standing. Some subjects treated of on these occasions were of an extremely confidential nature, and in view of the laxity of many eminent officials and--if the truth be told--of military officers as a body, the precautions taken by the First Sea Lord within my apartment were perhaps not without justification.

War is too serious a business to warrant the proclamation of prospective naval and military operations from the housetops. Reasonable precautions must be taken. One thing one did learn during those early months of the war, and that was that the fewer the individuals are--no matter who they may be--who are made acquainted with secrets the better. But this is not of such vital importance when the secret concerns some matter of limited interest to the ordinary person as it is when the secret happens to relate to what is calculated to attract public attention.

Of course it was most reprehensible on the part of that expansive youth, Geoffrey, to have acquainted Gladys--strictly between themselves of course--that his company had been "dished out with a brand-new, slap-up, experimental automatic rifle, that'll make Mr. Boche sit up when we get across." Still it did no harm, because Gladys doesn't care twopence about rifles of any kind, and had forgotten all about it before she had swallowed the chocolate that was in her mouth. But when Geoffrey informed Gladys a fortnight later--again strictly between themselves--that the regiment was booked for a stunt at Cuxhaven, it did a great deal of harm. Because, although Gladys did not know where Cuxhaven was, she looked it up in the atlas when she got home, and she thereupon realized, with a wriggle of gratification, that she was "in the know," and under the circumstances she could hardly have been expected not to tell Agatha--under pledge, needless to say, of inviolable secrecy. Nor would you have been well advised to have bet that Agatha would not--in confidence--mention the matter to Genevieve, because you would have lost your money if you had. Then, it was only to be expected that Genevieve should let the cat out of the bag that afternoon at the meeting of Lady Blabit's Committee for the Development of Discretion in Damsels, observing that in _such_ company a secret was bound to be absolutely safe. However, that was how the whole story came to be known, and Geoffrey might just as well have done the thing handsomely, and have placarded what was contemplated in Trafalgar Square alongside Mr. Bonar Law's frenzied incitements to buy war bonds.

Speaking seriously, there is rather too much of the sieve about the soldier officer when information comes to his knowledge which it is his duty to keep to himself. He has much to learn in this respect from his sailor brother. You won't get much to windward of the naval cadet or the midshipman if you try to extract out of him details concerning the vessel which has him on her books in time of war--what she is, where she is, or how she occupies her time. These youngsters cannot have absorbed this reticence simply automatically and as one of the traditions of that great Silent Service, to which, more than to any other factor, we and our Allies owe our common triumph in the Great War. It must have been dinned into them at Osborne and Dartmouth, and it must have been impressed upon them--forcibly as is the way amongst those whose dwelling is in the Great Waters--day by day by their superiors afloat. The subject used not to be mentioned at the Woolwich Academy in the seventies. Nor was secretiveness inculcated amongst battery subalterns a few years subsequently. One does not recollect hearing anything about it during the Staff College course, nor call to mind having preached the virtues of discretion in this matter to one's juniors oneself at a later date. Here is a matter which has been grossly neglected and which the General Staff must see to.

When Lord Kitchener was going to be away from town for two or three days in the summer of 1915, he sometimes instructed me to be at Mr. Asquith's beck and call during his absence in case some important question should suddenly arise, and once or twice I was summoned to 10 Downing Street of a morning in consequence, and was ushered into the precincts. On these occasions the Prime Minister was to be found in a big room upstairs; and he was always walking up and down, like Aristotle only that he had his hands in his pockets. His demeanour would be a blend of boredom with the benign. "Whatch-think of this?" he would demand, snatching up some paper from his desk, cramming it into my hand, and continuing his promenade. Such observations on my part in response to the invitation as seemed to meet the case would be acknowledged with a grunt--dissent, concurrence, incredulity, or a desire for further information being communicated by modulations in the grunt. Once, when the document under survey elaborated one of Mr. Churchill's virgin plans of revolutionizing the conduct of the war as a whole, the Right Honourable Gentleman in an access of exuberance became garrulous to the extent of muttering, "'Tslike a hen laying eggs."

But, all the same, when instructions came to be given at the end of such an interview, they invariably were lucid, concise, and very much to the point. You knew exactly where you were. For condensing what was needed in a case like this into a convincing form of words, for epitomizing in a single sentence the conclusions arrived at (supposing conclusions by any chance to have been arrived at) after prolonged discussions by a War Council, or at a gathering of the Dardanelles Committee, I have never come across anybody in the same street with Mr. Asquith.