On examining all this stuff, it soon became manifest that the publication of any papers at all during the war, in connection with this controversial subject, was to be deprecated. Still, one recognized that the Prime Minister's promise had to be fulfilled somehow; so the great object to be kept in view seemed to be to keep publication within the narrowest possible limits compatible with satisfying the curiosity of the people in Parliament. As a matter of fact, there were passages in some of the documents which Mr. Churchill proposed for production that must obviously be expunged, in view of Allies' susceptibilities and of their conveying information which might still be of value to the enemy. There could be no question that, no matter how drastic might be the cutting-down process, the Admiralty, the War Office and the Government would come badly out of the business. Furthermore, any publication of papers must make known to the world that Lord Kitchener's judgement in connection with this particular phase of the war had been somewhat at fault.
When asking me to take the matter up, the Army Council had probably overlooked my civilian status or forgotten what a strong position this placed me in. An ex-soldier does not often get an opportunity of enjoying an official heart-to-heart talk, on paper, with the powers-that-be in the War Office. My report was to the effect that it was undesirable to produce any papers at all during the war, but that, as some had to be produced, they ought to be cut down to a minimum, that everybody official concerned in the business at home would be more or less shown up, that this was particularly unfortunate just at this time in view of Lord Kitchener's lamented death, that the papers must be limited to those bearing upon the period antecedent to the actual landing of the army in the Gallipoli Peninsula, that if this last proviso was accepted I would go fully into the question and report in detail, and that if the proviso was not accepted I declined to act and they might all go to the—well, one did not quite put it in those words, but they would take it that way. The result was not quite what one had either expected or desired. The production-of-papers project was dropped, and the Dardanelles Commission was appointed instead.
Mr. Lloyd George had become Secretary of State for War by this time. He was full of zeal and of original ideas, nor had he any intention of being merely a "passenger." He had, after the manner of new War Ministers, introduced a fresh personal entourage into the place, and a momentary panic, caused by the news that telephonic communications into and out of the place were passing in an unknown guttural language not wholly unlike German, was only allayed on its being ascertained that certain of his hangers-on conversed over the wires in Welsh. Besides being full of original ideas, the new Secretary of State was in a somewhat restless mood. He took so keen an interest in some wonderful scheme in connection with Russian railways (about which I was freely consulted) that he evidently was hankering after going on a mission to that part of the world himself. He no doubt believed that a visit from him would be an equivalent for the visit by Lord Kitchener which had been interrupted so tragically. To anybody who had recently been to Russia, such an idea was preposterous. Few who counted in the Tsar's dominions had ever heard of the Right Honourable Gentleman at this time; Lord Kitchener's name, on the other hand, had been known, and his personality had counted as an asset (as I knew from my own experience), from Tornea on the Lappland borders to the highlands of Erzerum. The project did not strike one as deserving encouragement, and I did what I could to damp it down unobtrusively.
It was nearly a year later than this, in the summer of 1917, that, owing to the horse of General Whigham, the Deputy C.I.G.S., slipping up with him near the Marble Arch and giving him a nasty fall, he became incapacitated for a month. Sir W. Robertson thereupon called me in to act as locum tenens. From many points of view this proved to be a particularly edifying and instructive experience. One could not fail to be impressed with the smoothness with which the military side of the War Office was working under the system which Sir William had introduced, and one furthermore found oneself behind the scenes in respect to the progress of the war and to numbers of matters only known to the very few.
The plan under which nearly all routine work in connection with the General Staff, work that the C.I.G.S. would otherwise be obliged to concern himself with personally to a large extent, was delegated to a Deputy who was a Member of the Army Council was an admirable arrangement. It worked almost to perfection as far as I could see. It allowed Sir W. Robertson, in consultation with his Directors of Military Operations and of Intelligence, Generals Maurice and Macdonogh, to devote his attention to major questions embracing the conduct of the war on land as a whole. The Deputy in the meantime wrestled with the details, with the correspondence about points of secondary importance, in fact with the red tape if you like to call it that, while keeping in close and constant touch with the administrative departments and branches. Everybody advocates de-centralization in theory; Sir William actually carried it out in practice, reminding me of that Prince of military administrators, the late Sir H. Brackenbury. The Deputy's room opened off that of the C.I.G.S.; but on many days I never even saw him except when he looked in for a minute to ask if I had anything for him, or when I happened to walk home some part of the way to York House with him after the trouble was over for the day.
It was intensely interesting to have the daily reports of casualties at the Western Front passing through one's hands, and to note the extent to which these mounted up on what might be called non-fighting days as compared to days of attack. As this was during the opening stages of the Flanders offensive subsequent to General Plumer's victory at Messines, these statistics were extremely instructive. I do not know whether the details have ever been worked out for the years 1915-17, but it looked to me at that time as if the losses in three weeks of ordinary trench-warfare came on the average to about the same total as did the losses in a regular formal assault of some section of the enemy's lines. Or, putting the thing in another form and supposing the above calculation to be correct, you would in three weeks of continuous attack in a given zone only lose the same number of men as you would lose in that same zone in a year of stagnant, unprofitable trench-warfare. Some of our offensives on the Western Front have been condemned on the grounds of their costliness in human life; but it has not been sufficiently realized in the country how heavy the losses were during periods of quiescence.
As acting D.C.I.G.S. one, moreover, enjoyed opportunities of examining the various compiled statements showing the numbers of our forces in the various theatres, with full information as to the strength of our Allies' armies in all quarters, as well as the carefully prepared estimates of the enemy's fighting resources as these were arrived at by our Intelligence organizations in consultation with those of the French, Italians, Belgians, and others. One learnt the full details of our "order of battle" for the time being, exactly where the different divisions, army corps, etc., were located, and who commanded them. It transpired that the Entente host on the Salonika Front at this time comprised no fewer than 655,000 of all ranks, without counting in the Serbs who would have brought the total up to about 800,000, while the enemy forces opposed to them were calculated to muster only about 450,000; the situation was, in fact, much worse than one had imagined. One discovered that, while slightly over 17 per cent of the male population of Great Britain had been enrolled as soldiers, only 5 per cent of the Irish male population had come forward, and that but for north-east Ulster the figure would not have reached 3 per cent. One became aware, moreover, that the Army Council, or at least its Military Members, were at loggerheads with the War Cabinet over the problem of man-power, and that this question was from the military point of view giving grounds for grave anxiety.
In one of my drawers there was the first draft of a secret paper on this subject, which expressed the views of the Military Members of the Council in blunt terms, and which amounted in reality to a crushing indictment of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. I have a copy of the draft in my possession, but as it was a secret document it would be improper to give details of its contents; it, moreover, was somewhat modified and mellowed in certain particulars before the paper was actually sent to Downing Street. The final discussion took place at a full meeting of the Army Council while I was acting as D.C.I.G.S., but which I did not attend as not being a statutory member of that body. Parliament ought to call for this paper; it was presented in July 1917; it practically foreshadowed what actually occurred in March 1918. The Military Members of the Council nearly resigned in a body over this business; but they were not unanimous on the question of resignation, although perfectly unanimous as regards the seriousness of the position. It may be mentioned that at a considerably later date the Army Council did, including its civilian members, threaten resignation as a body when Sir N. Macready gave up the position of Adjutant-General to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, owing to an attempt made from Downing Street to civilianize the Adjutant-General's department. The Army Council beat Downing Street, hands down.
The disquieting conditions in respect to man-power were, incidentally, hampering the development of two important combatant branches at this time, the Machine-Gun Corps and the Tank Corps. The heavy demands of these two branches, coupled with the fact that infantry wastage was practically exceeding the intake of recruits, threatened a gradual disappearance of the principal arm of the Service. We had by this time got long past the stage with which, when D.M.O., I had been familiar, where lack of material and munitions was checking the growth of our armies in the field. We had arrived at the stage where material and munitions were ample, but where it was becoming very difficult to maintain our armies in the field from lack of personnel—a state of things directly attributable to the Government's opportunist, hand-to-mouth policy in the matter, and to their disinclination to insist upon practically the whole of the younger categories of male adults joining the colours. The organization of the Tank Corps was finally decided actually while I was acting as D.C.I.G.S. In so far as the general control of Tank design and the numbers of these engines of war to be turned out was concerned, it seemed to me to be a case of "pull devil, pull baker" between the military and the civilians as to how far these matters were to be left entirely to the technicalist; but the technicalist was not perhaps getting quite so much to say in the matter as was reasonable. The personal factor maybe entered into the question.
When the War Office had been reconstituted by the Esher Committee in 1904, the Admiralty organization had been to a great extent taken as a model for the Army Council arrangement which the triumvirate then introduced. Thirteen years later the Admiralty was reorganized, and on this occasion the War Office system of 1904, as modified and developed in the light of experience in peace and in war, was taken as the model for the rival institution. Whigham had played a part in the carrying out of this important reform, lending his advice to the sailors and explaining the distribution of duties amongst the higher professional authorities on our side of Whitehall, especially in connection with the General Staff. The most urgently needed alteration to be sought after was the relieving of the First Sea Lord of a multitude of duties which were quite incompatible with his giving full attention to really vital questions in connection with employing the Royal Navy. For years past he had been a sort of Pooh Bah, holding a position in some respects analogous to that occupied by Lord Wolseley and Lord Roberts when they had been nominally "Commander-in-chief" of the army. Under the arrangements made with the assistance of the War Office in 1917, a post somewhat analogous to that of D.C.I.G.S. was set up at the Admiralty, and the First Sea Lord was thenceforward enabled to see to the things that really mattered as he never had been before. Although the amount of current work to be got through daily when acting as Deputy C.I.G.S. proved heavy enough during the month when I was locum tenens, it was not so heavy as to preclude my looking through the instructive documents dealing with this matter amongst Whigham's papers.