e side of the
Entente.

We had, however, never established a very satisfactory understanding
with the Russian General Staff. A number of British officers of high
rank had gone out to pay more or less complimentary visits, but
rather more than that appeared to be needed. I had been thinking in
the latter part of 1915 that some steps ought to be taken in this
direction, and so, when it became known that Sir W. Robertson was
shortly coming over to become C.I.G.S. at the War Office, which would
assuredly mean other important changes of personnel, I wrote to him
suggesting that I should go out and talk things over with General
Alexeieff, the Russian Chief of the General Staff. After Sir William
had taken over charge and had considered the matter, he agreed, and he
gave me practically a free hand as regards making known our views,
only stipulating that I should return promptly and report to him.

One of the many active and capable members on its rolls, Captain R. F.
Wigram, was picked out from the Director of Military Operations' staff
to perform the functions of Staff Officer and A.D.C. He possessed the
merit amongst many others of being young and of looking younger, and
he lost no time in exhibiting his remarkable fitness for the post. For
without one moment's hesitation he bereft his club in Pall Mall of the
services of a youth of seventeen, who by some mysterious process
became eighteen then and there, whom he converted into a private of
Foot, whom he fitted out with a trousseau extracted from the Ordnance
Department that a Prince of the Blood proceeding to the North Pole
might have coveted, and who thus, as by the stroke of a magician's
wand, became transformed into an ideal soldier-servant. We made our
way north-eastwards via Newcastle, Bergen and Stockholm, round the
north of the Gulf of Bothnia, and thence on through Finland to
Petrograd. Traversing the chilly northern waters between the Tyne and
the Norse fiords, it became possible to appreciate to some very small
degree what months of watching for a foe who could not be induced to
leave port on the surface must have meant to the sister service and to
its wonderful auxiliaries drawn from the Mercantile Marine. For if
there is a more dismal, odious, undisciplined stretch of ocean on
the face of the globe than the North Sea, it has not been my
ill-fortune to have had to traverse it.

Our Foreign Office has served as a butt for a good deal of criticism
of late years