No such war had been fought upon the earth's surface, and each succeeding day opened a new prospect. With every branch of both services discovering strange and imperative needs; with no section of our national life that was failing to experience some fresh dislocation--it was little wonder that, in the various higher executives, changes and experiments in change should have been found necessary. Many, perhaps most of these, were proved to be inadequate, and replaced by others as the war went on. Others were doomed from the first and should never have been embarked upon. It had been so arranged, for {104} example, at the War Office, that most of the General Staff officers should take commands in the field; and, when Lord Kitchener became Secretary for War, the General Staff practically ceased to exist. Accustomed to self-reliance, to centralization even in the minutest details, Lord Kitchener assumed powers so various and important, as it was impossible for any one man to wield; and, to some extent, though not to such an extreme, a similar process had set in at the Admiralty. Instead of the Board of Admiralty, consisting of the First Lord, the four Sea Lords, the two Civil Lords, the Parliamentary and Permanent Secretaries, there had come into being a War Staff Group, including the First Lord and the First Sea Lordd (but none of the other Sea Lords), the Chief of Staff, the Permanent Secretary, a Naval Secretary, and Sir Arthur Wilson--the latter, "Tug" Wilson, as he was called, although retired, being regarded as one of our greatest naval strategists. That was the composition in November, 1914, of the real directorate of the navy, Lord Fisher, who succeeded Prince Louis of Battenburg, on October 30th, being First Sea Lord.