Nothing less than the whole history of the past eighteen
months!--beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those
harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and
so ignorantly reproached. At the word "Belgium" on August 4th, practically
the whole English nation fell into line. We felt no doubts--we knew what
we had to do. But the problem was how to do it. Outside the Navy and the
Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had
neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and
we knew it. The fact is more than our justification--it is our glory. If
we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week
after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane
men have behaved as we did in the years before the war?--233,000 men on
active service--and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's
millions!--with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any wonder that the
country--our untouched, uninvaded country--safe as it believed itself to
be under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of
our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to
which--for the faith of treaties' sake, for self-defence's sake--it was
committed?

And yet--was it after all so slow? The day after war was declared the
Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of half a
million of men to the Army, and a first war credit of a hundred millions
of money (five hundred million dollars). The first hundred thousand men
came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days. By
September 4th nearly three hundred thousand fresh men had enlisted--by
Christmas half a million. By May, a million men had been added to the new
Armies; by September, 1915, Sir John French alone had under his command
close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in
December, 1915, the addition of another million men to the Army was voted