One would thereupon proceed to investigate the project, or whatever the thing was, would muster one's data, would probably consult some subordinate and get him to lend a hand, and by, say, 10.15 A.M. one had hurriedly drafted out a memorandum, and had handed it to one's typists with injunctions that the draft must be reproduced at all hazards within twenty minutes. About 10.30 A.M. a War Office messenger, wearing a hunted look on his face, would appear at one's door. "His Lordship wants to know, sir, if you have that paper ready that he asked you for." "Tell him that he shall have it directly," and one got on to the telephone to the clerks' room and enjoined despatch. In another ten minutes, Lord K.'s Private Secretary, and one of the best, Creedy, would turn up panting but trying not to look heated. "I say, can't you let the S. of S. have that confounded paper he is worrying about? Do be quick so that we may have some peace." Fresh urgings through the telephone, accompanied by reminders that the twenty minutes had more than elapsed. Five minutes later Fitzgerald would arrive. "Look here! K.'s kicking up the devil's own fuss because you won't let him have some paper or other. Typists? But it's always those typists of yours, General. Why don't you have the lot up against the wall out in the courtyard, and have them shot? It's the only thing to do in these cases." When one had almost given up hope, the typist would hurry in with a beautifully prepared document, and one would rush off to the Chief. "Oh! Here you are at last. What a time you've been. Now, let me see what you say.... Well, that seems all right. But stop. Show me on the map where this place B—— that you mention is. One of them may ask." They were just a little exhausting, those occasions.
What exactly the tomfoolery is that expert typists engage on after they have typed a document, I have never been able to discover. As long as they are at play on their machines these whirr like the propeller of a Handley-Page. They get down millions of words a minute. But when they have got the job apparently done, they simmer away to nothing. They perform mysterious rites with ink-eraser. They scratch feebly with knives. They hold up to the light, they tittivate, they muse and they adorn. It is not the slightest use intimating that you do not care twopence whether there are typographic errors or not—the expert typist treats you with the scorn that the expert always does treat the layman with. At such junctures it is an advantage if the typist happens to be a he, because you can tell him what you think of him. If the typist happens to be a she, and you tell her what you think of her, the odds are she will take cover under a flood of tears, and goodness only knows what one is supposed to do then. Not that my typists were not highly meritorious—I would not have exchanged them with anybody. They merely played their game according to the rules.
Lord K. could no doubt be really unreasonable on occasion; but I can only recall one instance of it in my own experience. It all arose over our Military Attaché at our Paris embassy, Colonel H. Yarde-Buller, having taken up his abode from an early date at Chantilly so as to be in close touch with General Joffre's headquarters. Not being on the spot at the Embassy, his work in the meantime was being done, and very well done, by our Naval Attaché, Captain M. H. Hodges. I do not know why it was, but one afternoon the Chief sent for me to say that a Military Attaché was required at once in Paris, and that I was to proffer names for him to choose from forthwith. After consultation with my French experts, I produced a list of desirable candidates for the post, all, to a man, equipped with incontestable qualifications. But Lord K. would have none of my nominees, although he probably knew uncommonly little about any of them. I tried one or two more casts, but the Chief was really for the moment in an impossible mood. Even Fitzgerald was in despair. At last the name of Colonel Le Roy Lewis occurred to me, whom I somehow had not thought of before; but on repairing to the Chief's anteroom, where Fitz always was, a restful air was noticeable in the apartment, and Fitz acquainted me in a tone of relief that the boss had gone off home. He moreover counselled me to keep Le Roy Lewis up my sleeve and to lie low, as the whole thing might have blown over by next day, and that is exactly what happened. One heard no more about it; but several weeks later I began myself to find that the military work in Paris was getting so heavy that we ought to have an attaché of our own, instead of depending upon the Admiralty's man, Hodges. So I went to Lord K., proposed the appointment of a second Military Attaché, and suggested Le Roy Lewis for the job. "Certainly," said Lord K.; "fix the business up with the Foreign Office, or whatever's necessary." The fuss there had been a few weeks before had apparently been forgotten.
His intimate acquaintance with the French language stood him in rare stead, and this undoubtedly represented an asset to the country during the period that he was War Minister. His actual phraseology and his accent might peradventure not have been accounted quite faultless on the boulevards; but he was wonderfully fluent, he never by any chance paused for a word, and he always appeared to be perfectly familiar with those happy little turns of speech to which the Gallic tongue so particularly lends itself. The ease with which he took charge of, and dominated, the whole proceedings on the occasion of one or two of the earlier conferences on the farther side of the Channel between our Ministers and the French astonished our representatives, as some of them have told me. He thoroughly enjoyed discussions with foreign officers who had been sent over officially to consult with the War Office about matters connected with the war, and he always, as far as one could judge, deeply impressed such visitors. I do not think that the warmth with which some of them spoke about him after such pow-wows when I ushered them out, was a mere manifestation of politeness. He was gifted with a special bent for diplomacy, and he prided himself with justice on the skill and tact with which he handled such questions.
Quite early in the war—it must have been about November 1914—a small Portuguese military mission turned up, bearers of a proposal that our ancient ally should furnish a division to fight under Sir J. French's orders on the Western Front. Our Government, as it happened, were not anxious, on political grounds which need not be gone into here, for open and active co-operation on the part of Portugal at this time. Regarding the question from the purely military point of view, one doubted whether the introduction into the Flanders war zone of Portuguese troops, who would require certain material which we could then ill spare before they took the field, would not be premature at this early juncture. When tactfully interrogating concerning the martial spirit, the training efficiency, and so forth, of the rank and file, one was touched rather than exhilarated by the head of the mission's expression of faith "ils savent mourir." The officers composing the mission were, however, enthusiasts for their project, and they were on that account somewhat difficult to keep, as it were, at arm's length. But Lord K.'s management of the problem was masterly.
In the course of a protracted conference in his room, he contrived to persuade our friends from Lisbon that the despatch of the division at this moment would be a mistake from their, and from everybody else's, point of view, and he extracted promises out of them to let us have many thousands of their excellent Mauser rifles, together with a goodly number of their Schneider-Canet field guns. The small arms (of which we were horribly short at the time) proved invaluable in South Africa and Egypt, while the guns served to re-equip the Belgian army to some extent with field artillery. He managed to convince the mission that this was by far the most effective form of assistance which Portugal could then afford to the Entente—as was indeed the case—and he sent them off, just a little bewildered perhaps, but perfectly satisfied and even gratified. One felt a little bewildered oneself, the whole business had been conducted with such nicety and discretion.
His name counted for much in the armies of the Allies, as I myself found later wherever I went in Russia. Foreign officers coming on official errands to London, attached an enormous importance to obtaining an interview with him, and he was very good about this. "Oh, I can't be bothered with seeing the man," he would say; "you've told him the thing's out of the question. What's the good of his coming to me, taking up my time?" "But you see, sir," one would urge; "he's a little rubbed up the wrong way at not getting what he wants, and will not put the thing pleasantly to his own people when he fetches up at their end. You can smooth him down as nobody else could, and then he'll go away off out of this like a lamb and be quite good." "Oh well, bring him along. But, look here. You must have him away again sharp out of my room, or he'll keep on giving tongue here all the rest of the day." What actually happened as a rule on such occasions was that Lord K. would not let the missionary get a word in edgeways, smothered him with cordiality, chattered away in French as if he were wound up, and the difficulty was, not to carry the man off but to find an opportunity for jumping up and thereby conveying a hint to our friend that it was time to clear out. "Comme il est charmant, M. le Maréchal," the gratified foreign officer would say after one had grabbed him somehow and conducted him out of the presence; "je n'oublierai de ma vie que je lui ai serré la main." And he would go off back to where he had come from, as pleased as Punch, having completely failed in his embassy.
But Lord K. could if the occasion called for it, adopt quite a different tone when dealing with an Allied representative, and I have a vivid remembrance of one such interview to which there seems to be no harm in referring now. Some aspects of the tangled political web of 1915, in the Near East, will be dealt with at greater length in Chapter VII. Suffice it to say here that, at the juncture under reference, Serbia, with formidable German and Austro-Hungarian hosts pouring into her territory from the north and aware that her traditional foe, Bulgaria, was mobilizing, desired to attack Tsar Ferdinand's realm before it was ready. That, from the purely military point of view, was unquestionably the sound procedure to adopt. "Thrice is he armed who has his quarrel just, but four times he who gets his blow in fust." We know now that it would have been the sound procedure to adopt, even allowing for arguments against such a course that could be put forward from the political point of view. But our Government's attitude was that, in view of engagements entered into by Greece, the Serbs must not act aggressively against the still neutral Bulgars. Nor do I think that, seeing how contradictory and inconclusive the information was upon which they were relying, they were to blame for maintaining an attitude which in the event had untoward consequences.
One afternoon the Serbian Military Attaché came to see me. He called in to beg us soldiers to do our utmost to induce H.M. Government to acquiesce in an immediate offensive on the part of King Peter's troops against the forces of the neighbouring State, which were mobilizing and were evidently bent on mischief. I presented our Government's case as well as I could, although my sympathies were in fact on military grounds entirely on the side of my visitor. He thereupon besought me to take him to Lord Kitchener, and I did so. The Chief talked the question over in the friendliest and most sympathetic manner, he gave utterance to warm appreciation of the vigorous, heroic stand which the sore-beset little Allied nation had made, and was making, in face of dangers that were gathering ever thicker, he expressed deep regret at our inability to give effective assistance, and he admitted that from the soldier's point of view there was much to be said for the contention that an immediate blow should be struck at Serbia's eastern neighbour. But he stated our Government's attitude in the matter clearly and uncompromisingly, and he would not budge an inch on the subject of our sanctioning or approving an attack upon Bulgaria so long as Bulgaria remained neutral.
The Attaché protested eagerly, volubly, stubbornly, pathetically, but all to no purpose. Then, when at last we rose to our feet, Lord K., finding his visitor wholly unconvinced, drew himself up to his full height. He seemed to tower over the Attaché, who was himself a tall man, and—well, it is hard to set down in words the happenings of a tense situation. The scene was one that I never shall forget, as, by his demeanour rather than by any words of his, Lord K. virtually issued a command that no Serb soldier was to cross the Bulgar border unless the Bulgars embarked on hostilities. The Attaché stood still a moment; then he put his kepi on, saluted gravely, turned round and went out without a word. I followed him out on to the landing. "Mon Dieu!" he said; "mon Dieu!" And then he went slowly down the great marble staircase, looking a broken man. But for that interview the Serbs might perhaps have given their treacherous neighbours an uncommonly nasty jar before these got going, and this might have rendered their own military situation decidedly less tragic than it came to be within a very few days. But I do not see that Lord Kitchener could have done otherwise than support the attitude of the Government of which he was a member.