le-hearted concurrence. By some of them--it may have
been a mistaken impression on my part--the visits of the First Lord of
the Admiralty to their Chief hardly seemed to be welcomed with the
enthusiasm that might have been expected. Whisperings from across the
Channel perhaps made one more critical than one ought to have been,
but, be that as it may, the project hardly struck one as an especially
inviting method of employing force at that particular juncture. We
were deplorably short of heavy howitzers, and we were already feeling
the lack of artillery ammunition of all sorts. Although some
reinforcements--the Twenty-Seventh and Twenty-Eighth Divisions--were
pretty well ready to take the field, no really substantial
augmentation of our fighting forces on the Western Front was to be
anticipated for some months. The end was attractive enough, but the
means appeared to be lacking.

In long-range--or, for the matter of that, short-range--bombardments
of the Flanders littoral by warships I placed no trust. Mr.
Churchill's "we could give you 100 or 200 guns from the sea in
absolutely devastating support" of the 22nd of November to Sir J.
French would not have excited me in the very least. In his book, the
Field-Marshal ascribes the final decision of our Government to refuse
sanction to a plan of operations which they had approved of at the
first blush, partly to French objections and partly to the sudden
fancy taken by the War Council for offensive endeavour in far-distant
fields. That may be the correct explanation; but it is also possible
that after careful consideration of the subject Lord Kitchener
perceived the tactical and strategical weakness of the plan in itself.

My staff was from the outset a fairly substantial one--much the
largest of that in any War Office Directorate--and, although I am no
great believer in a multitudinous personnel swarming in a public
office, it somehow grew. It was composed partly of officers and others
whom I found on arrival, partly of new hands brought in automatically
on mobilization like myself to fill the places of picked men who had
been spirited away with the Expeditionary Force, and partly of
individuals acquired later on as other regular occupants were received
up into the framework of the growing fighting forces of the country. A
proportion of the new-comers were dug-outs, and it may not be out of
place to say a word concerning this particular class of officer as
introduced into