et 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