Still, perambulation of those furlongs of corridor in the big building in Whitehall might have offered points of interest to a visitor not too exhausted to take notice. By one window was usually to be seen a posse of parsons, of furtive aspect, each nervously twiddling a lissom hat, a love-your-neighbour-as-yourself look frozen on their countenances, and not by any means conveying for the time being an impression of the church militant: they were candidates for the post of army chaplain, and were about to be inspected by the genial prelate who presided over the department responsible for the spiritual welfare of the troops. A day or two later might be seen in the same place some of these very candidates, decked out in khaki raiment, hung about with contrivances into which combatant comrades introduce implements for slaying their fellow-men, erect, martial, terrifying, the very embodiment of the church triumphant, having been accepted for the job and awaiting orders—and no men have done finer service in the Great Adventure.
At another point one encountered a very well-known cricketer, who was doling out commissions. How he did it one had no time to ask. But one strongly suspected that, if one of the young gentlemen whom he took in hand had been in a school eleven or even house eleven (or said he had), crooked ways somehow became straight.
Just outside my own door an attractive-looking civilian had devised a sort of wigwam within which he took cover—one of those arrangements with screens which second lieutenants prepare when there is a regimental dance, and which they designate, until called to order, as "hugging booths." There he was to be seen at any hour of the day in close communion with a fascinating lady, heads close together, murmuring confidences, an idyll in a vestibule—or rather a succession of idylls, because there was a succession of ladies, all of them different except in that all of them were charming. After two or three months he disappeared, and only then did it occur to me to ask what these intimate transactions were on which he had been engaged. It transpired that he was acting vicariously on my behalf, that he was selecting a staff for censorship duties or some such dull occupation, in my place. If good looks were a qualification for such employment, that civilian must have been troubled with an embarras de richesses.
Amongst the many privileges and responsibilities which my position in the early months of the war thrust upon me was that of finding myself in more or less official relations with the Eminent K.C. and with the Self-Appointed Spy-Catcher. One may have had the good fortune in pre-war times to meet the former, when disguised as a mere human being—on the links, say, or at the dinner table. The latter, one came into contact with for the first time.
The average soldier seldom finds himself associated with the Eminent K.C. on parade, so to speak, in the piping times of peace. When performing, and on the war-path as you might say, this successful limb of the law is a portentous personage. Persuasive, masterful, clean-shaven, he fixes you with his eye as the boa-constrictor fascinates the rabbit. Pontifically, compassionately, almost affectionately indeed, he makes it plain to you what an ass you in reality are, and he looks so wise the while that you are hardly able to bear it. He handles his arguments with such petrifying precision, he marshals his facts so mercilessly, he becomes so elusive when you approach the real point, and he grows so bewildering if he detects the slightest symptoms of your having discovered what he is driving at, that he will transform an elementary military question, which you in your folly have presumed to think that you understand, into a problem which a very Moltke would ignominiously fail to elucidate.
Contact with the Eminent K.C. under such conditions makes you realize to the full what an inestimable boon lawyers confer upon their fellow-citizens when they sink all personal ambition and flock into the House of Commons for their country's good. It makes you rejoice in that time-honoured arrangement under which the Lord Chancellorship is the reward and recognition, not of mastery of the principles and practice of jurisprudence, but of parliamentary services to a political faction. It convinces you that the importance of judges and barristers having holidays of a length to make the public-school-boy's mouth water, immeasurably exceeds the importance of litigation being conducted with reasonable despatch. It accounts for the dexterity invariably displayed by Parliament when new enactments are placed on the Statute-Book, for the simplicity of the language in which they are couched, and for that minimum of employment to the legal profession to which these specimens of masterly legislation subsequently give rise. The Eminent K.C. is, by the way, reputed to be a somewhat expensive luxury when you avail yourself of his services in your civil capacity, but he must be well worth it. A man who can be so mystifying when he proposes to be lucid must prove a priceless asset to his client when he undertakes the task of bamboozling a dozen unhappy countrymen penned in a box. It is hard to picture to yourself this impressive figure giggling sycophantically at the pleasantries of a humorous judge. But he must have conformed to convention in this matter in the past, for how otherwise could he now be an Eminent K.C.?
During many months of acute national emergency, while the war was settling into its groove, there was no more zealous, no more persevering, and no more ineffectual subject of the King than the Self-Appointed Spy-Catcher. You never know what ferocity means until you have been approached by a titled lady who has persuaded herself that she is on the track of a German spy. We Britons are given to boasting of our grit in adversity and of our inability to realize when we are beaten. In no class of the community were these national traits more conspicuous in the early days of the war than in the ranks of the amateur spy-catching fraternity and sisterhood—for the amateur spy-catcher never caught a spy. Only after months of disappointment and failure did these self-appointed protectors of their country begin to abandon a task which they had taken up with enthusiastic fervour, and which they had prosecuted with unfaltering resolution. Although it was at the hands of the despised professional that enemy agents were again and again brought to face the firing party in the Tower ditch, the amateurs entertained, and perhaps still entertain, a profound contempt for the official method. One fair member of the body, indeed, so far forgot herself as to write in a fit of exasperation to say that we must—the whole boiling of us—be in league with the enemy, and that we ought to be "intered."
They were in their element when, after the fall of Maubeuge, it transpired that the Germans had gun-platforms in certain factories situated within range of the forts, that they had established ready prepared for action should they be required. Anybody with an asphalt lawn-tennis court then became suspect. A very bad case was reported from the Chilterns, just the very sort of locality where Boches contemplating invasion of the United Kingdom would naturally propose to set up guns of big calibre. A building with a concrete base—many buildings do have concrete bases nowadays—near Hampstead was the cause of much excitement. When the unemotional official, sent to view the place, suggested that the extremely solid structure overhead would be rather in the way supposing that one proposed to emplace a gun, or guns, on the concrete base, it was urged that there was a flat roof and that ordnance mounted on it would dominate the metropolis. There was a flat roof all right, but it turned out to be of glass.
A number of most worthy people were much concerned over the subject of certain disused coal-mines in Kent, where, they had persuaded themselves, the enemy had stored quantities of war material. What precisely was the nature of the war material they did not know—aircraft as like as not, the aviator finds the bottom of a mine-shaft an ideal place to keep his machine. These catacombs were duly inspected by an expert, but he could find nothing. The worthy people thereupon declared that the penetralia had not been properly examined and desired permission to carry out a searching inspection themselves. They were, if I remember aright, told they might go down the mines or might go to the devil (or words to that effect) for all we cared. Had one not been so busy one could have got a good deal of fun out of the Self-Appointed Spy-Catcher.
The Military Operations Directorate had nothing to do with the formation and organization of the New Armies, but one heard a good deal about their birth and infancy. Apart from the question of their personal equipment, in regard to which the Quartermaster-General's Department (with Lord Kitchener at its back and urging it forward) performed such wonders, the most troublesome question in connection with their creation in the early stages was the provision of officers; the men were procured almost too fast. This became the business of the Military Secretary's Department. The M.S. Department holds tenaciously to the dogma that maladministration is the child of precipitancy and that deliberation stamps official procedure with the hall-mark of respectability. In later stages of the war one never was gazetted to an appointment until after one had passed on to the next one. But a gunner "dug-out," Colonel "Bill" Elliot, had been roped into the Department on mobilization, having been similarly roped in during the South African War, and by good luck the question of officers for the New Armies was turned over to him.