Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918. Sir C. E. Callwell
violated the neutrality of Luxemburg and was threatening Belgium openly.
I ought to mention here that this appointment to the post of Director of Military Operations came as a complete surprise—my not having been warned well in advance had been due to an oversight; up to within a few months earlier, when I had ceased to belong to the Reserve of Officers, having passed the age-limit for colonels, my fate in the event of general mobilization was to have been something high up on the staff of the Home Defence Army. One could entertain no illusions. Heavy responsibilities were involved in taking up such an appointment on the eve of war. After five years of civil life it was a large order to find myself suddenly thrust into such a job and to be called upon to take up charge of a War Office Directorate which I knew was overloaded. Ever since 1904, ever since the date when this Directorate had been set up by the Esher Committee as one item in the reconstitution of the office as a whole and when my section of the old Intelligence Division had been absorbed into it, I had insisted that this composite branch was an overburdened and improperly constituted one.
For the Esher triumvirate had amalgamated "operations" and "intelligence," while they had deposited "home defence" in the Military Training Directorate. It was an absurd arrangement in peace-time, and one that was wholly unadapted to the conditions of a great war. Lord Esher and his colleagues would seem, however, to have been actuated by a fear lest the importance of home defence should overshadow that of preparation for oversea warfare if the two sets of duties were in one hand, and, inasmuch as they were making a start with the General Staff at Headquarters and bearing in mind former tendencies, they may have been right. They, moreover, hardly realized perhaps that intelligence must always be the handmaid of operations, and that it is in the interest of both that they should be kept quite distinct. It was natural that the first Chief of the General Staff to be appointed, Sir N. Lyttelton, should have hesitated to overset an organization which had been so recently laid down and which had been accepted by the Government as it stood, even if he recognized its unsuitability; but I have never been able to understand how his successors, Sir W. Nicholson and Sir J. French, failed to effect the rearrangement of duties which a sound system of administration imperatively called for. That my predecessors, Generals "Jimmy" Grierson, Spencer Ewart, and Henry Wilson, made no move in the matter is rendered the more intelligible to me by the fact that I took no steps in the matter myself, even when the need for a reorganization was driven home by the conditions brought about in the War Office during the early months of the Great War. Somehow one feels no irresistible impulse to abridge one's functions and to depreciate one's importance by one's own act, to lop off one's own members, so to speak. But when Sir W. Robertson turned up at the end of 1915 to become C.I.G.S. he straightway split my Directorate in two, and he thus put things at last on a proper footing.
The incongruity of the Esher organization had, it may be mentioned, been well illustrated by an episode that occurred very shortly after the reconstitution of the War Office had been carried into effect in the spring of 1904. Under the distribution of duties then laid down, my section of the Operations Directorate dealt inter alia, with questions of coast defence in connection with our stations abroad, while a section of the Military Training Directorate dealt inter alia with questions of coast defence in connection with our stations at home. It came about that the two sections issued instructions simultaneously about the same thing, and the instructions issued by the two sections were absolutely antagonistic. The consequence was that coast defence people at Malta came to be doing the thing one way, while those at Portsmouth came to be doing it exactly the opposite way, and that the War Office managed to give itself away and to expose itself to troublesome questionings. The blunder no doubt could be put down to lack of co-ordination; but the primary cause was the existence of a faulty organization under which two different branches at Headquarters were dealing with the one subject.
The earliest experiences in the War Office in August 1914 amounted, it must be confessed, almost to a nightmare. There were huge maps working on rollers in my spacious office, and in particular there was one of vast dimensions portraying what even then was coming to be called the Western Front. During the week or so that elapsed before G.H.Q. of the Expeditionary Force proceeded to the theatre of war, its cream thought fit to spend the hours of suspense in creeping on tiptoe in and out of my apartment, clambering on and off a table which fronted this portentous map, discussing strategical problems in blood-curdling whispers, and every now and then expressing an earnest hope that this sort of thing was not a nuisance. It was a most intolerable nuisance, but they were persons of light and leading who could not be addressed in appropriate terms. As hour to hour passed, and H.M. Government could not make up its mind to give the word "go" to the Expeditionary Force, G.H.Q.'s language grew stronger and stronger until the walls resounded with expletives. It was not easy to concentrate one's attention upon questions arising in the performance of novel duties in a time of grave emergency under such conditions, and it was a genuine relief when the party took itself off to France.
One was too busy to keep notes of what went on in those days and I am not sure of exact dates, but I think that it was on the 6th of August that a wire, which seemed on the face of it to be trustworthy, came to hand from a German port, to the effect that transports and troops were being collected there to convey a military force somewhither. This message caused the Government considerable concern and very nearly delayed the despatch of the Expeditionary Force across the Channel. One was too new to the business to take the proper steps to trace the source of that message, which, as far as I remember, purported to emanate from one of our consuls; but I have a strong suspicion that the message was faked—was really sent off by the Germans. Lord Kitchener had taken up the appointment of Secretary of State that morning, and in the afternoon he walked across Whitehall, accompanied by my immediate chief, Sir C. Douglas the C.I.G.S., General Kiggell, and myself, to discuss the position with Mr. Churchill and the chiefs of the Admiralty in the First Lord's room. Whitehall was rendered almost impassable by a mass of excited citizens, and Lord Kitchener on being recognized was wildly cheered. Nothing could have been clearer and more reassuring than Mr. Churchill's exposition of the naval arrangements to meet any attempt at a landing on our shores, and any one of the War Office quartette who may have been troubled with qualms—I had felt none myself—must have had his anxiety allayed.
It will not be out of place to refer here to one aspect of the virtual emasculation of the General Staff at the War Office on mobilization that has not perhaps quite received the attention that it deserves. That, in spite of his being Director of Military Operations in Whitehall, General Wilson very properly accompanied the Expeditionary Force will hardly be disputed. He had established close and cordial relations with the French higher military authorities, he could talk French like a Parisian, he had worked out the details of the concentration of our troops on the farther side of the Channel months before, and he probably knew more about the theatre where our contingent was expected to operate than any man in the army. But he was not the only member of the Military Operations Directorate staff who disappeared; he took his right-hand man and his left-hand man in respect to actual operations with him. Nevertheless, as I was pretty familiar with the working of the War Office, and as the planting down of the Expeditionary Force beyond Le Cateau was effected, practically automatically, by the Movements branch under the Quartermaster-General, operations question in respect to the war in the West gave no great trouble until my Directorate had had time to settle down after a fashion in its new conditions.
But the Intelligence side of General Wilson's Directorate included a branch which dealt with a number of matters with which no Director brought in from outside was likely to be well acquainted, and about which I knew nothing at all. Very few officers in the regular army are conversant with international law. Nor used they, in the days before 1914, to interest themselves in the status of aliens when the country is engaged in hostilities, nor with problems of censorship of the post and telegraph services, nor with the relations between the military and the Press, nor yet with the organization, the maintenance, and the duties of a secret service. Before mobilization, all this was in the hands of a section under the D.M.O. which was in charge of Colonel (now Lieut.-General Sir G.) Macdonogh, who had made a special study of these matters, and who had devised a machinery for performing a number of duties in this country which on the outbreak of war necessarily assumed a cardinal importance and called for efficient administration at the hands of a large personnel, only to be got together when the emergency arose. But Colonel Macdonogh on mobilization took up