later chapter. In the War Office alone, several departments and
branches were concerned, including my own up to a certain point. The
Ministries of Munitions and Shipping were in the affair as well,
together with the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, and last but not
least, the Treasury. But what was everybody's business was nobody's
business. Each department involved declared that some other one must
take the matter up and get things unravelled, and at last in a fit of
exasperation, although my branch was only a 100 to 3 outsider in the
matter, I took the bull by the horns and wrote privately to Sir M.
Hankey, asking him to put the subject of Greek Supplies on the Agenda
for the War Cabinet on some early date and to summon me to be on hand,
which he did. When the matter came up, Mr. Lloyd George enquired of me
what the trouble was. I told him that we were in a regular muddle,
that we could not get on, that several Departments of State were in
the thing, but that it hardly seemed a matter for the War Cabinet to
trouble itself with. Could not one of its members take charge, get us
together, and give us the authority we required for dealing with the
problem? Mr. Lloyd George at once asked Lord Milner to take the
question up, not more than five minutes of the War Cabinet's time was
wasted, and within a very few hours Lord Milner had got the business
on a proper footing and we all knew where we were.

Now, supposing that instead of the War Cabinet it had been a case of
that solemn, time-honoured, ineffectual council composed of all the
principal Ministers of the Crown, gathered together in Downing Street
to discuss matters which the majority of those present never know any
more about than the man in the moon, what would have happened? We of
the War Office might among us, with decent luck, have managed to prime
our own private Secretary of State, and might have sent him off to the
Cabinet meeting with a knowledge of his brief. But, unless the
Ministers at the heads of the other Departments of State concerned had
been got hold of beforehand and told what to do and to say, they would
among the lot of them have made confusion worse confounded. If by any
chance a decision had then been arrived at, it would almost inevitably
have been a perfectly preposterous one, totally inapplicable to the
question that was actually at issue.

A summons to attend a War Cabinet meeting was not, however, an unmixed
joy. There was always an age