down and which had been
accepted by the Government as it stood, even if he recognized its
unsuitability; but I have never been able to understand how his
successors, Sir W. Nicholson and Sir J. French, failed to effect the
rearrangement of duties which a sound system of administration
imperatively called for. That my predecessors, Generals "Jimmy"
Grierson, Spencer Ewart, and Henry Wilson, made no move in the matter
is rendered the more intelligible to me by the fact that I took no
steps in the matter myself, even when the need for a reorganization
was driven home by the conditions brought about in the War Office
during the early months of the Great War. Somehow one feels no
irresistible impulse to abridge one's functions and to depreciate
one's importance by one's own act, to lop off one's own members, so to
speak. But when Sir W. Robertson turned up at the end of 1915 to
become C.I.G.S. he straightway split my Directorate in two, and he
thus put things at last on a proper footing.

The incongruity of the Esher organization had, it may be mentioned,
been well illustrated by an episode that occurred very shortly after
the reconstitution of the War Office had been carried into effect in
the spring of 1904. Under the distribution of duties then laid down,
my section of the Operations Directorate dealt _inter alia_, with
questions of coast defence in connection with our stations abroad,
while a section of the Military Training Directorate dealt _inter
alia_ with questions of coast defence in connection with our stations
at home. It came about that the two sections issued instructions
simultaneously about the same thing, and the instructions issued by
the two sections were absolutely antagonistic. The consequence was
that coast defence people at Malta came to be doing the thing one way,
while those at Portsmouth came to be doing it exactly the opposite
way, and that the War Office managed to give itself away and to expose
itself to troublesome questionings. The blunder no doubt could be put
down to lack of co-ordination; but the primary cause was the existence
of a faulty organization under which two different branches at
Headquarters were dealing with the one subject.

The earliest experiences in the War Office in August 1914 amounted, it
must be confessed, almost to a nightmare. There were huge maps working
on rollers in my spacious office, and in particular there was one of
vast dimensions portraying what even then wa