dominions had ever heard of the Right Honourable Gentleman at
this time; Lord Kitchener's name, on the other hand, had been known,
and his personality had counted as an asset (as I knew from my own
experience), from Tornea on the Lappland borders to the highlands of
Erzerum. The project did not strike one as deserving encouragement,
and I did what I could to damp it down unobtrusively.

It was nearly a year later than this, in the summer of 1917, that,
owing to the horse of General Whigham, the Deputy C.I.G.S., slipping
up with him near the Marble Arch and giving him a nasty fall, he
became incapacitated for a month. Sir W. Robertson thereupon called me
in to act as _locum tenens_. From many points of view this proved to
be a particularly edifying and instructive experience. One could not
fail to be impressed with the smoothness with which the military side
of the War Office was working under the system which Sir William had
introduced, and one furthermore found oneself behind the scenes in
respect to the progress of the war and to numbers of matters only
known to the very few.

The plan under which nearly all routine work in connection with the
General Staff, work that the C.I.G.S. would otherwise be obliged to
concern himself with personally to a large extent, was delegated to a
Deputy who was a Member of the Army Council was an admirable
arrangement. It worked almost to perfection as far as I could see. It
allowed Sir W. Robertson, in consultation with his Directors of
Military Operations and of Intelligence, Generals Maurice and
Macdonogh, to devote his attention to major questions embracing the
conduct of the war on land as a whole. The Deputy in the meantime
wrestled with the details, with the correspondence about points of
secondary importance, in fact with the red tape if you like to call it
that, while keeping in close and constant touch with the
administrative departments and branches. Everybody advocates
de-centralization in theory; Sir William actually carried it out in
practice, reminding me of that Prince of military administrators, the
late Sir H. Brackenbury. The Deputy's room opened off that of the
C.I.G.S.; but on many days I never even saw him except when he looked
in for a minute to ask if I had anything for him, or when I happened
to walk home some part of the way to York House with him after the
trouble was over for the day.

It was intensely interesting to have the daily reports of casualties