Within the War Office itself he certainly made things hum. In pre-war, plain-clothes days, those messengers of distinguished presence--dignity personified in their faultlessly-fitting official frock-coats and red waistcoats--had lent a tone of respectability to the precincts, compensating for the unfortunate impression conveyed by Adjutant-Generals and such like who perambulated the corridors in grimy, abandoned-looking "office jackets." (No scarecrow on duty afield in the remotest of rural districts would have been seen in the garment which my predecessor, now F.M., Bart., and G.C.B., left hanging up as a legacy in the apartment which he vacated in my favour.) But--although old hands will hardly credit it and may think I am romancing--I have seen those messengers tearing along the passages with coat-tails flying as though mad monkeys were at their heels, when Lord K. wanted somebody in his sanctum and had invited one of them to take the requisite steps. If the Chief happened to desire the presence of oneself, one did not run. Appearances had to be preserved. But one walked rather fast. An earlier paragraph has hinted that, owing to military authorities in Whitehall not seeing quite eye to eye with the new Secretary of State when he took up his appointment, he was to some small extent working in an atmosphere of latent hostility to his measures. This state of affairs was, however, of very short duration, and certainly did not hamper his operations in the slightest degree; he would indeed have made uncommonly short work of anybody whom he found to be actively opposing him, or even to be hanging back. But the situation in the case of G.H.Q. of the Expeditionary Force was different. It is a matter of common knowledge--anybody who was unaware of it before the appearance of Lord French's "_1914_" will have learnt it from that volume--that the relations between Lord Kitchener and some of those up at the top in connection with our troops on the Western Front were, practically from the outset, not quite satisfactory in character.