The temporary civil servant may be glad of his experience in a public department for many reasons, of which not the least is that it gave him some idea of the size and complexity of the government machine; he might sympathise more with a business man's complaints if in his correspondence with a government office the business man were sufficiently businesslike to read what was written and sufficiently intelligent to understand what he read.
From the first, the personnel of the War Trade Department was remarkably varied and variedly remarkable. The chairman of the Trade Clearing House, (Sir) Henry Penson was an Oxford economist; the head of the Intelligence Section a translator.[32] In a neighbouring room worked Alfred Sutro; in another, H. W. C. Davis, of Balliol; in others again would be found a professor, a poet, a publisher, a critic, a novelist and a historiographer royal.
Before the end of the war, the department had grown so big that few could have known more than half of the men and women in it; during the early days, when the machinery of the blockade had still to be erected, a small and amazingly harmonious body, contributing diverse experience from many countries and callings, established a freemasonry with hard-driven men in other departments; there was little obsolete routine; and other offices were not slow to recognise sympathetically that an immense burden of work had to be accomplished with few hands in a short time.
It has been said that the department changed its domicile several times; it also changed its constitution and title. When Lord Robert Cecil was appointed Minister of Blockade, the Trade Clearing House severed its connection with Lord Emmott's War Trade Department and became the War Trade Intelligence Department, under Lord Robert and in conjunction with such blockade organisations as the Contraband Committee and the Foreign Trade Department. At the end of the war, its decomposing remains were buried under the Department of Overseas Trade.
The task of preliminary organisation was not made easier by the uncertainty into which all government offices were plunged whenever a section of the press proclaimed that every department was sheltering companies of potential recruits. This is not the place to engage in a general discussion of the policy or the morality of conscription as imposed, without reference to the constituencies, on a country which, six years earlier, had supported a liberal government in its contest with the House of Lords. The constitutionalists may object that such a course made mock of representative government; the idealist may feel that the achievement of the voluntary system in the first eighteen months of the war was the greatest in English history and that no victory is worth a press-gang; and every critic who is not also a militarist will wonder how the army, alone of the services which require to draw from the limited common reservoir of man-power, is allowed to say that it can fix no maximum but requires all the men that it can get and then still more.
These are general reflections on compulsory service; and, as it had been imposed before the summer of 1916, criticism was then only relevant when directed to the method of its application. If industry was kept in the same uncertainty as the government service, it is amazing that industry was not destroyed. The first principle of applied conscription seemed to be that there were no principles: the system of one day was discarded the next; and no permanent arrangement of work was secure from the risk that a man exempted on Monday would be called up on Monday week. All men of military age were periodically reviewed and subjected to medical reexamination; apart from the waste of time to all concerned and the occasional incivility of medical boards which attributed physical defects to temperamental malice, no personal hardship was involved at first, though, when the doctors were encouraged to pass as fit for general service a man who had with difficulty qualified for "sedentary duty at home," the civil service too often lost a valuable worker in presenting to the army a confirmed invalid. The hardship fell rather on those who were responsible for organising the work without being sure who would be left to do it.
When once the machinery of the blockade was perfected, the chief concern of the department was to improve and to economise in its working. The year 1916 lacked the excitement of those earlier months when the temporary organisations were playing a game, picking up sides and inventing the rules as they went on; for one amateur civil servant interest only revived with the adhesion of America to the allies. On Easter-Eve, 1917, the department was requested to choose a representative to join the diplomatic mission which was being sent to Washington with Mr. Balfour at its head.
IV
The late war has been described a hundred thousand times as a life-and-death struggle. While a soldier may engage in such a struggle without allowing his reason to be overmastered by his nerves, the civilian population at home, learning little and understanding less, is always in some degree influenced by fear in the formation of its opinions:[33] credit in excess of its military deserts will be given to the power that joins the war on the right side, while opprobrium in excess of its moral turpitude will be poured on the power that joins the war on the wrong side or omits to join it at all. Italy, which forsook the triple alliance and ran away at Caporetto, is loaded with territorial rewards and praised as a champion of civilisation, while Turkey, which had no alliance to forsake and entered the war—like many another—for what could be got out of it, is first vilified and then skinned alive. It is the fortune of war: by throwing in its lot with the enemy, the Turkish government embarrassed the allies and increased their despondency; by throwing in its lot with the allies, the Italian government relieved that embarrassment and lightened that despondency.