f dug-outs who became
dug-ins, and who continued to serve their country for extended periods
with self-sacrificing devotion although the enemy was no longer in the
gate. But even in the disguises of private life a craftsman, fully
initiated into the mysteries by long practice, could appraise the
proceedings of the central administration of the Army from the
standpoint of inner knowledge, could watch its post-war proceedings
with detachment, and could note that amongst the numberless Government
institutions which took "it's never too late to spend" for their motto
after the conclusion of hostilities, the War Office was not absolutely
the most backward. Only by such formidable competitors as the
Munitions Ministry, the Air Ministry, and, last but not least, the
Office of Works did it apparently allow itself to be outpaced.

For relative prodigality during the course of the great emergency and
after it was over, the Office of Works perhaps, upon the whole, took
precedence over all rivals. Its prodigality was, to do it justice,
tempered by extortion. Did the system of commandeering hotels and
mammoth blocks of offices create new Departments of State? Or did the
creation of new Departments of State precede the commandeering of the
hotels and blocks of offices? Were the owners and occupiers of the
blocks of offices paid for them, or were they bilked like the hotel
proprietors? We know that householders were not only paid, but that
they were in many cases preposterously overpaid. And the worst of it
was that the Office of Works was not one of those _parvenu_
institutions, set on foot by Men of Business, which welled up so
irrepressibly on all sides. It was not one of those _macedoines_ of
friends of Men of Business, and of fish-out-of-water swashbucklers in
khaki, and of comatose messengers, and of incompletely dressed
representatives of the fair sex perpetually engaged in absorbing
sweets. It was an old-established portion of the structure of State. A
nomad offshoot of the War Office, such as that I was in charge of for
the last two years of the war, which after quitting the parent
building shifted its home three times within the space of twelve
months, enjoyed somewhat unusual opportunities for sizing up the
Office of Works.

In the matter of numerical establishment of its personnel, one
Department of State with which I was brought a good deal into contact
during the war, the Treasury, almost seemed to go into the opposite