Nor were "dug-outs," whether inside or outside of the War Office, by necessity and in obedience to some inviolable rule individuals languishing in the last stage of mental and bodily decay. Some of them were held to be not too effete to bear their burden even amid the stress and turmoil of the battlefield. One, after serving with conspicuous distinction in several theatres of war, finished up as Chief of the General Staff and right-hand man to Sir Douglas Haig in 1918. Those members of the band who were at my beck and call within the War Office generally contrived to grapple effectually with whatever they undertook, and amongst them certainly not the least competent and interesting was a Rip Van Winkle, whom we will call "Z"—for short.
A subaltern at the start, "Z" was fitted out with all the virtues of the typical subaltern, but was furnished in addition with certain virtues that the typical subaltern does not necessarily possess. It could not be said of him that
deep on his brow engraven
Deliberation sat and sovereign care,
but he treated Cabinet Ministers with an engaging blend of firmness and familiarity, and he could, when occasion called for it, keep Royalty in its place. Once when he thought fit to pay a visit on duty to Paris and the front, he took me with him, explaining that unless he had a general officer in his train there might be difficulties as to his being accompanied by his soldier servant. Generals and colonels and people of that kind doing duty at the War Office did not then have soldier servants—but "Z" did. It is, however, bare justice to him to acknowledge that, after I had served his purpose and when he came to send me back to England from Boulogne before he resumed his inspection of troops and trenches, he was grandmotherly in his solicitude that I should meet with no misadventure. "Have you got your yellow form all right, sir? You'd better look. No, no; that's not it, that's another thing altogether. Surely you haven't lost it already! Ah, that's it. Now, do put it in your right-hand breast pocket, where you won't get it messed up with your pocket-handkerchief, sir, and remember where it is." It reminded one of being sent off as a small boy to school.
It was his practice to make a round of the different Public Departments of a forenoon, and to draw the attention of those concerned in each of them to any matters that appeared to him to call for comment. The Admiralty and the Foreign Office naturally engaged his attention more than others, but he was a familiar figure in them all. His activities were so varied indeed that they almost might have been summed up as universal, which being the case, it is not perhaps altogether to be wondered at that he did occasionally make a mistake. For instance:
He burst tumultuously into my room one morning flourishing a paper. "Have you seen this, sir?" As a matter of fact I had seen it; but as the document had conveyed no meaning to my mind, dissembled. Its purport was that 580 tons of a substance of which I had never heard before, and of which I have forgotten the name, had been landed somewhere or other in Scandinavia. "But do you know what it is, sir? It's the most appalling poison! It's the concoction that the South Sea Islanders smear their bows and arrows with—cyanide and prussic acid are soothing-syrup compared to it. Of course it's for those filthy Boches. Five hundred and eighty tons of it! There won't be a bullet or a zeppelin or a shell or a bayonet or a dart or a strand of barbed-wire that won't be reeking with the stuff." I was aghast. "Shall I go and see the Director-General, A.M.S., about it, sir?"
"Yes, do, by all means. The very thing."
He came back presently. "I've seen the D.-G., sir, and he's frightfully excited. He's got hold of all his deputies and hangers-on, and the whole gang of them are talking as if they were wound up. One of them says he thinks he has heard of an antidote, but of course he knows nothing whatever about it really, and is only talking through his hat, I tell you what, sir, we ought to lend them a hand in this business. I know Professor Stingo; he's miles and away the biggest man on smells and that sort of thing in London, if not in Europe. So, if you'll let me, I'll charter a taxi and be off and hunt him up, and get him to work. If the thing can be done, sir, he's the lad for the job. May I go, sir?"
"Very well, do as you propose, and let me know the result."
He turned up again in the afternoon. "I've seen old man Stingo, sir, and he's for it all right. He's going to collect a lot more sportsmen of the same kidney, and they're going to have the time of their lives, and to make a regular night of it. You see, sir, I pointed out to him that this was a matter of the utmost urgency—not merely a question of finding an antidote, but also of distributing it methodically and broadcast. After it's been invented or made or procured, or whatever's got to be done, some comedian in the Quartermaster-General's show will insist on the result being packed up in receptacles warranted rot-proof against everything that the mind of man can conceive till the Day of Judgment—you know the absurd way those sort of people go on, sir—and all that will take ages, æons." He really thought of everything. "And there'll have to be books of instructions and classes, and the Lord knows what besides! After that the stuff'll have to be carted off to France and the Dardanelles, and maybe to Archangel and Mesopotamia; so Stingo and Co. are going to be up all night, and mean to arrive at some result or to perish in the attempt. And now, sir, what have you done about it at the Foreign Office?"