To G.H.Q. from Home.
The greatest economy in steel is urged.
The position in regard to shipping is serious; the strictest economy in everything is necessary.
Lubricants are hard to get. We urge the greatest economy.
From G.H.Q. to Home.
More machine-guns are urgently needed.
There is a shortage of blankets; there is a shortage of 8,000 tons of barbed wire. New searchlights are needed; 300,000 box respirators are needed for the American Forces.
I could fill many pages with matter of the same sort. The poison of the submarine war began to have its cumulative effect just when we were getting the most peremptory reminders that Supply was going to be the determining factor of the final struggle, that war had become more and more a matter of striking at the enemy's life by striking at "the means whereby he lives." Munitions, food, equipment, railways, roads, ships—these had become the most important factors, and victory would incline to the Force which could best concentrate the means to maintain an overwhelming force at some particular point, which could best develop, conserve, and transport its material. The field for the strategist had moved more and more from the Front line towards the Base.
Fortunately, the British Army in France had for its Q.M.G. at this crisis a man with the courage and the knowledge to carry through a drastic reorganisation of the Supply and Transport services. Lieutenant-General Sir Travers Clarke, who took over as Q.M.G., France, at the end of 1917, was a daring experiment on Lord Haig's part; for he was a comparative youngster to be put into a post which was then the most anxious and onerous in the Army, and his actual substantive rank was that of a major; but he was an acting Major-General with a fine record in a minor theatre of the war. Lord Haig knew his man well, though, and, what was just as necessary, knew how to back his man. He put Sir Travers Clarke in the saddle and kept him there in spite, I have no doubt, of many thunderous protests from influential quarters, for Sir Travers Clarke was a ruthless reformer and a stubborn upholder of any course of action he thought necessary. A character sketch of him that appeared in the Morning Post in 1919 is worth quoting in part:
LIEUT-GENERAL SIR TRAVERS CLARKE
"'That big young man,' was a leading American officer's term to describe Sir Travers Clarke after he had met him in France in Conference, and had not caught his name. British G.H.Q. perhaps only learned to appreciate the Q.M.G. fully from the comments of foreign officers who came into touch with him in 1918. The masterful man took his power so quietly, came to big decisions with such an air of ease, such an absence of anything dramatic or violent, that it was a little difficult to understand his full strength.
"'T.C.'—as often before remarked, the British Army must reduce everything and everyone to initials—as a regimental officer in the 'Nineties never seemed to get an opening. Nor did his early Staff work bring him much recognition. But an officer of his to-day, who was a clerk under him when he was first a Staff Captain, insists that he always gave the impression of great power in reserve. 'He believed in the British Army, in hard work, and in himself.' That was the foundation of the career of a man who, once an opening showed, forged ahead with marvellous speed to his destiny.