Apart from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the same as our National Guard and vary in quality in the same way.  Native Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical shell-fire of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of the British regulars who were withdrawn for France.  Every rifle that England could bring to the assistance of the French in their heroic stand was a rifle to the good.

Meanwhile, she was making her new army.  For the first time since Cromwell’s day, all classes in England were going to war.  Making an army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert labour which you have to train.  Let us even suppose that the factory is ready and that the proprietor must mobilize his managers, overseers, foremen, and labour from far and near—­a force individually competent, but which had never before worked together.  It would require some time to organize team-play, wouldn’t it?  Particularly it would if you were short of managers, overseers, and foremen.  To express my meaning from another angle, in talking once with an English pottery manufacturer he said: 

“We do not train our labour in the pottery district.  We breed it from generation to generation.”

In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding them from generation to generation.  You may think that system is wrong.  It may be contrary to our ideals.  But in fighting against that system for your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must have weapons as effective as the enemy’s.  You express only a part of Germany’s preparedness by saying that the men who left the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, became trained soldiers at the command of the staff as soon as they were in uniform and had rifles.  These men had the instinct of military co-ordination bred in them, and so had their officers, while England had to take men from the plough and the shop, the factory and the office, and equip them and teach them the rudiments of soldiering before she could consider making them into an army.

It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the emergency.  Another and even more important requisite went with it.  If my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the courage of wisdom which leaves an expert’s work to an expert.  England had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the confidence of the nation through the long months of preparation, when there was little to show except repetition of drills here and there on gloomy winter days.  It required a man with a big conception and patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense of duty.  The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming.  “Are you learning to think in big numbers?” was Lord Kitchener’s question to his generals.