they became sceptical. The Ministry of
Munitions, one can well imagine, discounted the estimates that they
got from their manufacturing establishments. The War Office certainly
discounted the estimates that it got from the Ministry of Munitions.
Commanders-in-chief in the field consequently no longer miscalculated
what they might expect, to the same extent as Sir J. French did in May
1915.

I only became directly associated with armament questions in the
summer of 1916, and then came for the first time into contact with the
Ministry of Munitions. Such questions are matters of opinion, but it
always seemed to me that this Department of State would have done
better had it stuck to its proper job--that of providing what the Army
and the Air Service required. The capture of design and inspection by
the Ministry may have been unavoidable, seeing that this new
organization was improvised actually during the course of a great war
and under conditions of emergency; but the principle is radically
wrong. It is for the department which wants a thing to say what it
wants and to see that it gets it. As a matter of fact, the Munitions
Ministry occasionally went even farther, and actually allocated goods
required by the Army to other purposes. When a well-known and popular
politician, after spending some three years or so at the front with
credit to himself, took up a dignified appointment in Armament
Buildings, the first thing that he did was to promise a trifle of 400
tanks to the French without any reference to the military authorities
at all. Still, who would blame him? His action, when all is said and
done, was merely typical of that "every man for himself, and the devil
take the hindmost" attitude assumed by latter-day neoteric Government
institutions. But even the most phlegmatic member of the community
will feel upset when the trousers which he has ordered are consigned
by his tailor to somebody else, and on this occasion the War Office
did gird up its loins and remonstrate in forcible terms.

With regard to the War Office and munitions, it only remains to be
said again in conclusion that the country was never told the truth
about this subject until some months after the armistice, when the
nation had ceased to care. Never was it told till then, nor were the
forces which had been fighting in the field told, that the great
increase in the output of guns, howitzers, machine-guns, and
ammunition, which took place from the autum