material, month after month, went into the hopper. The urgent call of
the recruiting posters and the press had, in the earlier stages of the
war, supplied all the volunteers which could be utilized. It took much
longer to prepare equipment and facilities than to get men to enlist.
New Army battalions which reached the front in August, 1915, had had
their rifles only for a month. Before rifles could be manufactured rifle
plants had to be constructed. As late as December, 1915, the United
States were shipping only five thousand rifles a week to the British.
Soldiers fully drilled in the manual of arms were waiting for the arms
with which to fight; but once the supply of munitions from the new
plants was started it soon became a flood.

All winter the New Army battalions had been arriving in France. With
them had come the complicated machinery which modern war requires. The
staggering quantity of it was better proof than figures on the shipping
list of the immense tonnage which goes to sea under the British flag.
The old life at the front, as we knew it, was no more. When I first saw
the British Army in France it held seventeen miles of line. Only
seventeen, but seventeen in the mire of Flanders, including the bulge of
the Ypres salient.

By the first of January, 1915, a large proportion of the officers and
men of the original Expeditionary Force had perished. Reservists had
come to take the vacant places. Officers and non-commissioned officers
who survived had to direct a fighting army in the field and to train a
new army at home. An offensive was out of the question. All that the
force in the trenches could do was to hold. When the world wondered why
it could not do more, those who knew the true state of affairs wondered
how it could do so much. With flesh and blood infantry held against
double its own numbers supported by guns firing five times the number of