Here the limit of the French force immediately upon the front will
probably be set. The numbers continued to swell long before the end of
the first period and well on into the second, but they were kept in
reserve. Counting the men drafted in to supply losses and the reserve,
it is not unwise to put at about two and a half million men the
ultimate French figure, of which one and a half million formed, before
the end of the first period, the immediate fighting force.

Austria was ordered by the Germans to put into the field, as an
initial body to check any Russian advance and to confuse the beginning
of Russian concentration, about a million men; which in the first
period very rapidly grew to two million, and probably before the end
of the first period to about two million and a half.

Russia put into the field during the first weeks of the war some
million and a quarter, which grew during the first period (that is,
before the coming of winter had created a very serious handicap, to
which allusion will presently be made) to perhaps two million and a
half at the very most. I put that number as an outside limit.

Servia, of men actually present and able to fight, we may set down at
a quarter of a million; and Belgium, if we like, at one hundred
thousand--though the Belgian service being still in a state of
transition, and the degree of training very varied within it, that
minor point is disputable. Indeed it is better, in taking a general
survey, to consider only the five Great Powers concerned.

Of these the fifth, Great Britain, though destined to exercise by sea
power and by her recruiting field a very great ultimate effect upon
the war, could only provide, in this first period upon the Continent,