with
qualms--I had felt none myself--must have had his anxiety allayed.

It will not be out of place to refer here to one aspect of the virtual
emasculation of the General Staff at the War Office on mobilization
that has not perhaps quite received the attention that it deserves.
That, in spite of his being Director of Military Operations in
Whitehall, General Wilson very properly accompanied the Expeditionary
Force will hardly be disputed. He had established close and cordial
relations with the French higher military authorities, he could talk
French like a Parisian, he had worked out the details of the
concentration of our troops on the farther side of the Channel months
before, and he probably knew more about the theatre where our
contingent was expected to operate than any man in the army. But he
was not the only member of the Military Operations Directorate staff
who disappeared; he took his right-hand man and his left-hand man in
respect to actual operations with him. Nevertheless, as I was pretty
familiar with the working of the War Office, and as the planting down
of the Expeditionary Force beyond Le Cateau was effected, practically
automatically, by the Movements branch under the Quartermaster-General,
operations question in respect to the war in the West gave no great
trouble until my Directorate had had time to settle down after a
fashion in its new conditions.

But the Intelligence side of General Wilson's Directorate included a
branch which dealt with a number of matters with which no Director
brought in from outside was likely to be well acquainted, and about
which I knew nothing at all. Very few officers in the regular army are
conversant with international law. Nor used they, in the days before
1914, to interest themselves in the status of aliens when the country
is engaged in hostilities, nor with problems of censorship of the post
and telegraph services, nor with the relations between the military
and the Press, nor yet with the organization, the maintenance, and the
duties of a secret service. Before mobilization, all this was in the
hands of a section under the D.M.O. which was in charge of Colonel
(now Lieut.-General Sir G.) Macdonogh, who had made a special study
of these matters, and who had devised a machinery for performing a
number of duties in this country which on the outbreak of war
necessarily assumed a cardinal importance and called for efficient
administration at the hands of a large per