these technical stores must be brought into unified expert control, if only in order that their "behaviour" in action can be watched and that the experience gained may be embodied in new design. Having established a dominant position for technical stores the Esher Committee's principles are then invoked, and the rest follows in logical sequence. It is argued that divided control for technical and non-technical stores would be clearly wasteful if not impossible in the field, and that the obvious plan is to bring all stores under one person. Thus we arrive at the position where, by clever but specious argument, the technical expert becomes the purveyor of optical sights, motor parts, boot-laces and cooking pots.

The fundamental fallacy in this argument is that it strives to confuse general principles with the methods of their application. The principles of decentralization and responsibility once admitted operate equally in the most simple, as well as the most complex, physical surroundings. They apply alike to all ages and stages of our civilization. They may have to be modified in their methods of application to suit new conditions of life, but their human and psychological significance is firmly fixed. It is therefore wholly false to argue that divided responsibility finds justification in the complexity of each component function, or that interlocking and cognate services cease to interlock because the services themselves have become more skilled and elaborate. The main argument for unity gains rather than loses its cogency under our more complex conditions. In war the purpose sought is victory and, on the principle that the more difficult includes the easier, the test should be a war of movement. Here, as is well known, mobility is the essence of victory. Modern armies will tend to move faster and faster. This speed will involve a more rapid change of situation, and will require more frequent and more prompt decisions by commanders and increasingly rapid physical adjustments to meet changing circumstances. Under these circumstances any method of control which divides responsibility for cognate services must inevitably mean delay and may involve disaster. It therefore seems clear beyond all doubt that the advent of mechanization and of greater mobility, instead of disturbing, reinforces the underlying principles involved.

If it were established that the new proposals were sound in principle, the question of cost should not arise, as efficiency must

be procured whatever the expense. In view however of the widespread apprehension regarding the merits of these proposals, the question of expense becomes one of consequence. Lieut.-General Sir George McMunn in an article in The Times suggests that any extra cost in one direction will be compensated by savings elsewhere and that, inasmuch as the work will not be increased but will only be done by different people, it should not in the aggregate become costly. This argument is against all experience. Sir Charles Harris, who was at one time a member of the Army Council, and was for years head of the finance branch of the War Office, is well versed in official ways and their cost. With regard to the proposal to establish a fourth principal staff officer he says every addition leads to addition all round, else who is to answer the new man's minutes." This is the invariable experience.

Moreover the tendency of every separate department is to strive to enhance its prestige by large staffs and imposing offices. We are still far from the day when the efficiency of government offices will be rated inversely to the ratio of those employed. The staff in the War Office to-day is 4,377 as compared with 1,600 in 1914 for an army of 8,000 fewer troops. During the war it was also well known that in order to deal with the multitude of departments, many of them separate and co-equal, among which correspondence became engulfed, it was necessary to keep officers whose business it was to walk round and ascertain by personal interview the progress of any special matter. When functions overlap, the evil is immensely aggravated.

The extent to which the new arrangement will involve increase of staff with the army in the field is still obscure. Sir George McMunn has stated that the additional officer will only be represented at headquarters. With a small expeditionary force like that in the South African War, which directly controlled divisions or independent formations of all arms, this may be possible; it would hardly have been possible in the case of the British Expeditionary Force in France which vastly exceeded the entire force in South Africa. It is true that at present in formations below General Headquarters all administrative duties are vested in one directing staff officer. But this is no assurance for the future. As between the Quartermaster-General and the Adjutant-General there is little possibility of overlapping; as between the Q.M.G. and the M.G.O. staff officer, the overlapping will be incessant. The

functions of stores and their maintenance will claim to be represented by M.G.O. staff officers on the staff of armies and corps, and this will probably further involve a new hierarchy right down the chain of command, if only in order to see that their departmental rights are adequately protected against encroachment.

This aspect of self-protection has been well illustrated by Sir Charles Harris in a recent article. He is fully conversant with the tactics of departmental strife and he puts the matter in this way. With three principal staff officers, the two or more necessary to make a quarrel can be found in four ways; with four co-equal staff officers, there are eleven such possibilities. This proportion of four to eleven does not unduly exaggerate the increased volume of correspondence and circumlocution and delay that the new arrangement might involve. In the French army there is only one administrative staff officer, and the possibility of inter-staff disagreement is reduced to a minimum. That there is nothing fantastic in the suggestion of quarrelling is disclosed by the Secretary of State himself, who says that in a big war it might be necessary to have a chief administrative officer to take charge of these three officers and "knock their heads together if they started quarrelling." This should logically also involve a chief administrative officer at the War Office, where similar quarrelling is just as likely to occur, and this would in turn involve a reorganization of the Army Council if the similarity between the organization in the War Office and the field is to be preserved as recommended by the Esher Committee. The more the problem is examined the more the defects of its unsound basis. become apparent.

It might fairly have been expected that a far-reaching change } such as is now contemplated, however disorderly in thought, would at least have possessed the merit of ordered disorder. Yet this is not the case. It bears the stamp of most imperfect compromise. The department of the M.G.O. by virtue of its technical attainments is to have the responsibility for the repair of all stores, with the striking exception of vehicles on the establishment of the Army Service Corps which are "to be provided and maintained by the Q.M.G. under specification approved by the M.G.O." Provision involves the control of manufacture. Does this mean that the Q.M.G. is to maintain the separate custody of all Army Service Corps spares? It is only logical that he

should, and this at once introduces dual authority in store holding. Is he to maintain a separate establishment of repair mechanics? If so, the whole ideal of workshop unity goes by the board, and the only arrangement is to extend still further the vicious principle of dual control of allied services. This anomaly might be justified if Army Service Corps vehicles were only a small percentage of the whole. In point of fact they would normally far exceed in number the total of the tanks, dragons, and fighting vehicles; the cleavage in organization occasioned by their separate repair would be correspondingly large.

It has been asserted by those who support the proposed changes that the Esher Committee scheme cannot be regarded as sacrosanct, and that it must be modified to suit changes and circumstances. Nobody denies this as a general thesis. The difference only centres round what are principles and what are merely the methods of their application. I shall now attempt to show what changes should be made within the principles established by that committee.

In the first place an initial defect in the constitution of the Army Council itself should be corrected. From the inception the duties of the military members have overlapped to some extent and the committee has itself sinned against the light. The M.G.O. was entrusted with the technical functions of design, research and inspection. These are clear enough. But he was given in addition duties which properly appertain to supply, such as placing of contracts for all guns, ammunition and all technical stores; the construction and maintenance of forts and barracks; and in a totally different province the administration of the ordnance college. Forts and barracks have now gone to the Quartermaster-General. There is no reason why the supply of all war material, technical and otherwise, should not also follow. It could well and properly be entrusted to technicians on the contract side of that department, and this is its logical place. The present arbitrary division between technical and nontechnical stores serves no useful purpose and only creates confusion. The administration of the ordnance college is a purely educative service which should fall into line with all other educational services under the general staff. Its scientific character will not be impaired by such an arrangement, and the army as a whole will gain by its incorporation in the general system. It

is by handling and understanding such special institutions that the general staff will become more mechanically minded.

There then remain the services of research and design of war material. These are scientific and vitally important functions. The needle gun in 1866 contributed largely to the defeat of the Austrians, as the tanks did in 1917-18 to the victory of the Allies. Prescience in invention may greatly enhance morale, and even bring victory to a small and less highly-trained force. There is no limit to the money that might be wisely spent on fruitful thought, and it is wise to encourage in every possible way the faculty of invention, subject however to the important limitation that invention and design must be the handmaidens of general policy. War material and equipment must have regard to the likely theatre of war, to the methods of tactical use, the possibility of co-operation between various arms, to general organization, to the manufacturing capacity and man-power of the country, and to a number of considerations involved in higher policy. These are the province of the thinking department of the general staff, and the proper place for design is as a technical section or directorate within the general staff.

This need not dry up the fertility of invention, nor need it be derogatory to the expert. It would only mean that his work would be subordinate and yet closely allied to policy, and this is the proper arrangement. As part of the general staff, the expert would gain greater dignity and would be in a position to give to scientific thought its proper place in policy. I know this proposal is opposed to the recommendation of the Esher Committee, which says that the general staff should not be concerned with technique. But it is no longer technical to be mechanically minded, any more than hunting was technical in pre-motor days. Higher thought must adapt itself to the changed conditions of time and space. If this were done the department of the M.G.O. would disappear, and with it would go much of the internal friction that has hampered army business in the past. Experts would remain as parts in the general machine and, brought as they would be into the general stream of army life, the exclusive spirit born of so-called higher attainments would pass, and there would be a general levelling-up and better team work all round.

Turning to the organization in the field, it is now opportune to consider what changes are really desirable to give "mechanization" its proper place within the fighting forces. So far as the