Lord Haldane with his “art of clear thinking” elaborated the Imperial War Staff to its present magnificent dimensions. If any man wants a thing advertised, let him take it over there to the Secret Department. Only Sir Arthur Wilson and myself, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, knew the Naval plan of war. He was the man, so head-and-shoulders above all his fellows, who in his time was our undoubted, indeed our incomparable, Sea Leader. No one touched him; and I am not sure that even now, though getting on for Dandolo’s age, he would not still achieve old Dandolo’s great deeds. What splendid lines they are from Byron: “Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo, Th’ Octogenarian Chief, Byzantium’s Conquering Foe!” I loved Sir Arthur Wilson’s reported reply to the maniacs who think the Navy is the same as the Army. If it is not true it is _ben trovato_. He said the Naval War Staff at the Admiralty consisted of himself--assisted by every soul inside the Admiralty, and he added, “including the charwomen”--they emptied the waste-paper baskets full of the plans of the amateur strategists--Cabinet and otherwise. No such rubbish has ever been talked as about the Navy War Staff and also, in connexion therewith, the Admiralty clerks who are supposed to have wrecked its first inception in the period long ago when my great friend the late Admiral W. H. Hall was introduced into the Admiralty to form a Department of Naval Intelligence. I give my experience. I have been fifteen or more years in the Admiralty--Director of Ordnance and Torpedoes, Controller of the Navy, Second Sea Lord and First Sea Lord. Inside the Admiralty, for conducting administrative work, the Civil Service clerk is incomparably superior to the Naval Officer. The Naval Officer makes a very bad clerk. He hasn’t been brought up to it. He can’t write a letter, and, as you can see from my dictation, he is both verbose and diffuse. The Clerk is terse and incisive. I’ll go to instances. My Secretary, W. F. Nicholson, C.B., was really just as capable of being First Sea Lord as I was, when associated with my Naval Assistant. I often used to say that the First Sea Lord was in commission, and that I was the facile dupe of these two; and I was blessed with a succession of Naval Assistants who knew so exactly their limitations as regards Admiralty work as allowed the Admiralty machine to be, as was officially stated, the best, most efficient, and most effective of all the Government Departments of the State. I have a note of this, made by the highest authority in the Civil Service. I would like here to name my Naval Assistants, because they were out and away without precedent the most able men in the Navy: Admirals Sir Reginald Bacon, Sir Charles Madden, Sir Henry Oliver, Sir Horace Hood, Sir Charles de Bartolomé, Captain Richmond and Captain Crease--I’ll back that set of names against the world.