the military-transport service, consisting of some fifteen military
assistants and fifty or sixty clerks. The military transport service
included a personnel of fully 300,000 officers and men, and the branch
was charged with the obtaining of tens of thousands of motor vehicles
of all kinds and of the masses of spare parts needed to keep them in
working order, together with many other forms of transport material.
The whole of these two affiliated military branches of the War Office
could have been accommodated comfortably on one single floor of the
Hotel Metropole! Well has it been said that soldiers have no
imagination.

There were four especial branches under me to which some reference
ought to be made. Of two of them little was, in the nature of things,
heard during the war; these two were secret service branches, the one
obtaining information with regard to the enemy, the other preventing
the enemy from receiving information with regard to us. Of the other
two, one dealt with the cable censorship and the other with the postal
censorship. The Committee of Imperial Defence has been taken to task
in some ill-informed quarters because of that crying lack of
sufficient land forces and of munitions of certain kinds which made
itself apparent when the crisis came upon us. It was, however, merely
a consultative and not an executive body. It had no hold over the
purse-strings. Shortcomings in these respects were the fault not of
the Committee of Imperial Defence but of the Government of the day. On
the other hand, the Committee did splendid work in getting expert
sub-committees to compile regulations that were to be brought into
force in each Government department on the outbreak of war--compiling
regulations cost practically nothing. Moreover, thanks to its
representations and to its action, organizations were created in
peace-time for prosecuting espionage in time of war and for ensuring
an effective system of contre-espionage; these were under the control
of the Director of Military Operations, and were the two secret
branches referred to above.

About the former nothing can appropriately be disclosed. So much
interesting information about the latter has appeared in _German Spies
at Bay_ that little need be said about it, except to repeat what has
already appeared in that volume--the branch had already achieved a
notable triumph more than a fortnight before our Expeditionary Force
fired a shot and some hours before the