extreme from that which found favour in most limbs of the public
service. If the guardians of the nation's purse-strings practically
let the strings go during the early months of the contest, this may
have been due to the effervescent personality of the then Chancellor
of the Exchequer. But they took an uncommonly long time to recover
possession of the strings. Was this in any way attributable to
insufficiency of staff in times of great pressure? There was none of
that cheery bustle within the portals of Treasury Buildings such as
prevailed in the caravanseries of Northumberland Avenue after the
Munitions Ministry had seized them; typewriters were not to be heard
clicking frantically, no bewitching flappers flitted about, the place
always seemed as uninhabited as a railway terminus when the N.U.R.
takes a holiday.

The Treasury has ever, rightly or wrongly, been anathema to the
professional side of the War Office. The same sentiments would appear
to prevail amongst the sea-dogs who lurk in the Admiralty; for after
my having a slight difference of opinion with the Treasury
representative at a meeting of the War Cabinet one day, an Admiral who
happened to be present came up to me full of congratulations as we
withdrew from the battlefield. "I don't know from Adam what it was all
about," he declared, "but I longed to torpedo the blighter under the
table." But when one had direct dealings with the Treasury its
officials always were quite ready to see both sides of any question,
to take a common-sense view, and to give way if a good case could be
put to them; moreover, when they stuck their toes in and got their
ears back, they generally had some right on their side. Such feeling
of hostility as exists in the case of the War Office towards the
controllers of national expenditure housed on the farther side of
Whitehall is perhaps to some extent a result of unsatisfactory
internal administration on its own side of the street.

It is the manifest duty of the Finance Branch of the War Office to
keep down expenditure where possible, to examine any new proposal
involving outlay with meticulous care and critically, and to intimate
what the effect will be in terms of pounds, shillings and pence
supposing that some new policy which is under consideration should
come to be adopted. But, once a point has been decided by the Army
Council (the Finance Branch having had its say), that branch should
fight the War Office corner "all out