At the various forms of War Council at which the prosecution of the war was debated, one was necessarily brought into contact with a number of politicians and statesmen, and was enabled to note their peculiarities and to watch their methods. I never to my knowledge saw Lord Beaconsfield; but in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties Mr. Gladstone was sometimes to be met in the streets, and, even if one thought that he ought to be boiled, one none the less felt mildly excited at the spectacle. That aphorism, "familiarity breeds contempt," does put the point a little crudely; but the fact remains that when you are brought into contact with people of this kind, about whom there is such a lot of talk in the newspapers, they turn out to be very much like everybody else. Needless to say, they will give tongue to any extent, but, apart from that, they may even be something of a disappointment to those who anticipate great things of them. Still, it is only right to acknowledge that the majority of Ministers met with during the Great War were sensible enough in respect to military matters. The amateur strategist was fortunately the exception in these circles, and not the rule. Most of them picked up the fundamental facts in connection with any situation that presented itself quite readily; they grasped elementary principles when these were explained to them and they were able to keep those principles in mind. But there were goats as well as sheep. You might just as well have started dancing jigs to a milestone as have tried to get into the heads of one or two of them the elementary fact that the conduct of war cannot be decided on small-scale maps but is a matter of stolid and unemotional calculation, that imagination is a deadly peril when unaccompanied by knowledge, and that army corps and divisions cannot be switched about ashore or afloat as though they were taxi-cabs or hydroplanes.