with the assistance of
the superior grades amongst the creatures, becomes wrapped up in
devising employment for the multitudinous personnel that has been got
together. He then finds that he has not got sufficient accommodation
to house his legions--and so it goes on. He talks in moments of
relaxation of "introducing business methods into Whitehall." But that
is absurd. You could not introduce business methods into Whitehall,
because there is not room enough; you would have to commandeer the
whole of the West End, and then you would be cramped. While the big
men at the top are wrestling with housing problems, the staff are
engaged in writing minutes to each other--a process which, when
indulged in, in out-of-date institutions of the War Office,
Admiralty, Colonial Office type, is called "red tape," but which, when
put in force in a department watched over by Men of Business, is
called "push and go." Engulfed in one of the mushroom branches that
were introduced into the War Office in the later stages of the war, I
could not but be impressed by what I saw. The women were splendid: the
way in which they kept the lifts in exercise, each lady spending her
time going up and down, burdened with a tea-cup or a towel and
sometimes with both, was beyond all praise.

One is prejudiced perhaps, and may not on that account do full justice
to the achievements of some of those civilian branches which were
evolved within the War Office and which elbowed out military branches
altogether or else absorbed them. But they enjoyed great advantages,
and on that account much could fairly be expected of them. Your
civilian, introduced into the place with full powers, a blank cheque
and the uniform of a general officer, stood on a very different
footing from the soldier ever hampered by a control that was not
always beneficently administered--financial experts on the War Office
staff are apt to deliver their onsets upon the Treasury to the
battle-cry of _Kamerad_. Still, should the civilian elect to maintain
on its military lines the branch that he had taken over, he sometimes
turned out to be an asset. When the new broom adopted the plan of
picking out the best men on the existing staff, of giving those
preferred a couple of steps in rank, of providing them with large
numbers of assistants, and of housing the result in some spacious
edifice or group of edifices especially devised for the purpose, he
sometimes contrived to develop what had been