CHAPTER VIII
NAVAL WAR STAFF AND ADMIRALTY CLERKS
“A wise old owl lived in an oak;
The more he heard, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard;
Why can’t we be like that wise old bird?”
Lord Haldane with his “art of clear thinking” elaborated the Imperial War Staff to its present magnificent dimensions. If any man wants a thing advertised, let him take it over there to the Secret Department. Only Sir Arthur Wilson and myself, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, knew the Naval plan of war. He was the man, so head-and-shoulders above all his fellows, who in his time was our undoubted, indeed our incomparable, Sea Leader. No one touched him; and I am not sure that even now, though getting on for Dandolo’s age, he would not still achieve old Dandolo’s great deeds. What splendid lines they are from Byron:
“Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo,
Th’ Octogenarian Chief, Byzantium’s Conquering Foe!”
I loved Sir Arthur Wilson’s reported reply to the maniacs who think the Navy is the same as the Army. If it is not true it is ben trovato. He said the Naval War Staff at the Admiralty consisted of himself—assisted by every soul inside the Admiralty, and he added, “including the charwomen”—they emptied the waste-paper baskets full of the plans of the amateur strategists—Cabinet and otherwise.
No such rubbish has ever been talked as about the Navy War Staff and also, in connexion therewith, the Admiralty clerks who are supposed to have wrecked its first inception in the period long ago when my great friend the late Admiral W. H. Hall was introduced into the Admiralty to form a Department of Naval Intelligence. I give my experience. I have been fifteen or more years in the Admiralty—Director of Ordnance and Torpedoes, Controller of the Navy, Second Sea Lord and First Sea Lord. Inside the Admiralty, for conducting administrative work, the Civil Service clerk is incomparably superior to the Naval Officer. The Naval Officer makes a very bad clerk. He hasn’t been brought up to it. He can’t write a letter, and, as you can see from my dictation, he is both verbose and diffuse. The Clerk is terse and incisive.