solve these conundrums we have had to recreate for ourselves a
special field service system of food, water and ammunition supply. As an
instance we have had to re-organise baggage sections of trains and fit
up store ships as substitutes for additional ammunition columns and
parks. We are getting on fairly fast with our work of telling off troops
to transports so that each boat load of men landed will be, so to say,
on its own; victualled, watered and munitioned. But it takes some doing.
Greatly handicapped by absence of any Administrative, or Q. Staff. The
General Staff are working double shifts, at a task for which they have
never been trained:--

It's a way we have in the Aaarmy!
It's a way we have in the NAAAAvy!!
It's a way we have in the Eeeeeempire!!!
That nobody can deny!!!!

What would my friends on the Japanese General Staff say--or my quondam
friends on the German General Staff--if they knew that a
Commander-in-Chief had been for a fortnight in touch with his troops,
engaged with them upon a huge administrative job, and that he had not
one administrative Staff Officer to help him, but was willynilly using
his General Staff for the work? They would say "mad Englishmen" and this
time they would be right. The British public services are poisoned by
two enormous fallacies: (_a_) if a man does well in one business, he
will do equally well or better in another; (_b_) if a man does badly in
one business he will do equally badly or worse in another. There is
nothing beyond a vague, floating reputation or public opinion to enable
a new Minister to know his subordinates. The Germans have tabulated the
experiences and deficiencies of our leaders, active and potential, in
peace and war--we have not! Every British General of any note is
analysed, characterised and turned inside out in the bureau records of
the great German General Staff in Berlin. We only attempt anything of
that sort with burglars. My own portrait is in those archives and is
very good if not very flattering; so a German who had read it has told
me. This is organisation: this is business; but official circles in
England are so remote in their methods from these particular notions of
business that I must turn to a big newspaper shop to let anyone even
begin to understand what it is to run Q. business with a G.S. team.
Suppose Lord Northcliffe decided to embark upon a journalistic campaign
in Canada and that his scheme turned upon time; that it