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, some of which has perhaps not been wholly undeserved. But whether it was by design or was the result of some happy accident, Downing Street managed to be most efficiently represented at the courts of northern Europe during the epoch of the Great War. Sir G. Buchanan's outstanding services in Russia are now recognized on all hands--even apparently by H.M. Government. But the country also owes much to Sir E. Howard and to Sir M. Findlay, who represented us so worthily in Sweden and Norway during periods of exceptional stress and difficulty. It was a real pleasure when passing backwards and forwards through Scandinavia to meet these two strong men who were so successfully keeping the flag flying, to discuss with them the course of events, to be made acquainted with the peculiar problems that were constantly confronting them, to note the marked respect in which they were held on all hands, and to enjoy the hospitality of two typical English homes planted down in a foreign land. On one occasion Sir E. Howard was good enough to make special arrangements for me to meet the Russian and French Ministers at Stockholm and the French Military Attache at luncheon at the Legation, thereby enabling us to examine into a number of points of common interest.