III
The speed with which men threw themselves into unfamiliar work during the war was only equalled by the speed with which they were transferred from one kind of unfamiliar work to another; and to a man who had as little knowledge of administration as of teaching there was nothing surprising in the lightning conversion of an amateur schoolmaster into an amateur civil servant.[30]
One serious gap in the history of the war remains to be filled by a comprehensive account of the origin and growth of the temporary departments. Their number is to be reckoned by the score, their strength by scores of thousands; in function they ranged from encouraging thrift and translating enemy newspapers to ordering heavy artillery, commandeering ships and controlling the supply, distribution and price of food. Some were vast expansions of a sub-department in Foreign Office, Admiralty, Board of Trade or War Office, others—like those of Food and Shipping—were created by a minister out of a museum or hotel, a private telephone-exchange, a code of instructions, a supply of official stationery and an assortment of male and female clerks; some were set to function by an old civil servant borrowed from another office or resuscitated from retirement, others evolved their system by imitation or by the light of nature. If in five years there was a heavy bill to pay for overlapping and waste, for errors of judgement and blunders in execution, for interdepartmental warfare and magnification of private bishoprics, any one who saw the temporary civil service from the inside may feel that it was yet light in relation to the multiplicity of interests involved and to the amount of work accomplished.
In its genesis and development, the Trade Clearing House of the War Trade Department[31] was typical of most temporary offices. On the outbreak of hostilities, the National Service League found itself with premises, furniture, a staff and a number of at least temporarily obsolete functions. For a time a special censorship was established in connection with the Admiralty; one recruiting officer scoured the clubs of London, another the colleges of Oxford until a big and varied personnel had been collected; when more hands were required, each of the original members would recruit a friend, for whom he could vouch. As the work of the department was concerned with every kind of export trade, no one was admitted who could turn to private account any knowledge that came to him in his official capacity; and, though military service was not yet compulsory nor departmental exemption the desire of the gun-shy, the recruiting for the office was almost entirely confined to men who were over age or unfit.
The "department" had at first no official status; and, when a report of its activities in censorship reached the home secretary, he suggested that it should regularise itself if it wished to escape heavy penalties for interfering with his majesty's mails. At this time the Customs were thrown into difficulty and confusion by the proclamation of the king in council, forbidding all trade with the enemy: in the absence of records, investigation and an intelligence department, it was impossible to say whether goods cleared from London would ultimately reach enemy destination; and the censors who were watching the cable and wireless operations of Dutch and Scandinavian importers seemed the natural advisers to approach. At this point the embryonic department, which had risen from the ashes of the National Service League, joined with a licensing delegation from the Customs to form the War Trade Department and Trade Clearing House.
The formal executive authority lay with the Privy Council, but the department was a joint administrative and advisory body, receiving and transmitting information between War Office, Admiralty, Foreign Office, Home Office, Scotland Yard, the new Censorships and, indeed, any other department that would give or accept information designed to strengthen the blockade, to check espionage at home and the transmission of information abroad and to prevent trade with the enemy. As the work became organised and the records increased, there arose further duties of editing, compiling, summarising and translating, too numerous and technical to be described here.
The staff was recruited from dons and barristers, men of letters and stockbrokers, solicitors and merchants; but, until an incapacitated officer was here and there drafted on light duty to a government department, there was not one civil servant. The independent tributes of Lord Emmott and, later, of Lord Robert Cecil are the most convincing testimony that, even without the guidance of those who had been trained in the civil service, these temporary civil servants acquired its methods and imbibed something of its tradition. Within a few days the raw newcomers felt as if they had lived all their lives in a world of registries and files, of minutes and memoranda, of "second-division clerks" and messengers, as in a few days they were acclimatised to the universal office equipment of trestle-tables and desk-telephones, of card-indices and steel filing-cabinets, of "in" and "out" trays, of rubber stamps and "urgent" labels. The work was done first in congested corners of Central Buildings, Westminster, later in Broadway House and later still in Lake Buildings, St. James' Park. Everywhere the duties of the department expanded more quickly than its accommodation; and, though it began with apparently sufficient space in each new home, within a few weeks the big rooms were being divided by temporary partitions and the small were being filled with additional occupants.
As the civil service has undergone some slight modification in the last hundred years, it is encouraging to find that there is also a slight modification in the public estimate of it since Dickens satirised the Circumlocution Office. As yet, justice has only been done to it by ministers who recognise thankfully that it has no rival in the world for intellectual ability, conscientiousness, loyalty, honour and integrity. Recruited by a most searching examination from the best brains of the Oxford and Cambridge type, it receives fewer rewards and less payment than any other body of men charged with equal responsibility. No "budget secret" has ever leaked out, though it is in the power of a Treasury clerk to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice; during the war no man worked harder than the civil servant. Whether the "business men" who were acclaimed and imported so eagerly contrived to run their departments more cheaply can be answered by any tax-payer who chooses to enquire; that they ran them more efficiently may be doubted by any one who recalls the nightmare of confusion in which, say, the Ministry of Munitions came to birth; that they ran them with equal integrity may be challenged by small men who were compelled to disclose to powerful competitors their organisation and secret processes.
The temporary civil servant may be glad of his experience in a public department for many reasons, of which not the least is that it gave him some idea of the size and complexity of the government machine; he might sympathise more with a business man's complaints if in his correspondence with a government office the business man were sufficiently businesslike to read what was written and sufficiently intelligent to understand what he read.
From the first, the personnel of the War Trade Department was remarkably varied and variedly remarkable. The chairman of the Trade Clearing House, (Sir) Henry Penson was an Oxford economist; the head of the Intelligence Section a translator.[32] In a neighbouring room worked Alfred Sutro; in another, H. W. C. Davis, of Balliol; in others again would be found a professor, a poet, a publisher, a critic, a novelist and a historiographer royal.
Before the end of the war, the department had grown so big that few could have known more than half of the men and women in it; during the early days, when the machinery of the blockade had still to be erected, a small and amazingly harmonious body, contributing diverse experience from many countries and callings, established a freemasonry with hard-driven men in other departments; there was little obsolete routine; and other offices were not slow to recognise sympathetically that an immense burden of work had to be accomplished with few hands in a short time.
It has been said that the department changed its domicile several times; it also changed its constitution and title. When Lord Robert Cecil was appointed Minister of Blockade, the Trade Clearing House severed its connection with Lord Emmott's War Trade Department and became the War Trade Intelligence Department, under Lord Robert and in conjunction with such blockade organisations as the Contraband Committee and the Foreign Trade Department. At the end of the war, its decomposing remains were buried under the Department of Overseas Trade.
The task of preliminary organisation was not made easier by the uncertainty into which all government offices were plunged whenever a section of the press proclaimed that every department was sheltering companies of potential recruits. This is not the place to engage in a general discussion of the policy or the morality of conscription as imposed, without reference to the constituencies, on a country which, six years earlier, had supported a liberal government in its contest with the House of Lords. The constitutionalists may object that such a course made mock of representative government; the idealist may feel that the achievement of the voluntary system in the first eighteen months of the war was the greatest in English history and that no victory is worth a press-gang; and every critic who is not also a militarist will wonder how the army, alone of the services which require to draw from the limited common reservoir of man-power, is allowed to say that it can fix no maximum but requires all the men that it can get and then still more.
These are general reflections on compulsory service; and, as it had been imposed before the summer of 1916, criticism was then only relevant when directed to the method of its application. If industry was kept in the same uncertainty as the government service, it is amazing that industry was not destroyed. The first principle of applied conscription seemed to be that there were no principles: the system of one day was discarded the next; and no permanent arrangement of work was secure from the risk that a man exempted on Monday would be called up on Monday week. All men of military age were periodically reviewed and subjected to medical reexamination; apart from the waste of time to all concerned and the occasional incivility of medical boards which attributed physical defects to temperamental malice, no personal hardship was involved at first, though, when the doctors were encouraged to pass as fit for general service a man who had with difficulty qualified for "sedentary duty at home," the civil service too often lost a valuable worker in presenting to the army a confirmed invalid. The hardship fell rather on those who were responsible for organising the work without being sure who would be left to do it.
When once the machinery of the blockade was perfected, the chief concern of the department was to improve and to economise in its working. The year 1916 lacked the excitement of those earlier months when the temporary organisations were playing a game, picking up sides and inventing the rules as they went on; for one amateur civil servant interest only revived with the adhesion of America to the allies. On Easter-Eve, 1917, the department was requested to choose a representative to join the diplomatic mission which was being sent to Washington with Mr. Balfour at its head.