Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded.

Where the leaders?  Where the drillmasters for the new army?  Old officers came out of retirement, where they had become used to an easy life as a rule, to twelve hours a day of hard application.  “Dug-outs” they were called.  Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill new ones.  It was demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be made in six months; perhaps in three.  But it takes seven months to build a rifle-plant; many more months to make guns—­and the navy must never be stinted.  Probably the English are slow; slow and thoroughgoing.  They are good at the finish, but not quick at the start.  They are used to winning the last battle, which they say is the one that counts.  The complacency of empire with a century’s power was a handicap, no doubt.  We are inclined to lean forward on our oars, they to lean back—­which does not mean that they cannot lean forward in an emergency or that they lack reserve strength.  It may lead us to misjudge them.

Public impatience was inevitable.  It could not be kept silent; that is the English of it—­the American, too.  It demands to know what is being done.  It was not silent in the Civil War.  From the time McClellan started forming his new army until the Peninsular campaign was six months, if I remember rightly.  Von Moltke, who built the German staff system, said that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs; though I think if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later, in ’63, which would have ended the Civil War there and then, he would have had an interesting time before he returned to Berlin.

The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most thoroughly organized military machine that the world has ever known.  Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to catch up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting themselves to the new features of the war.  They had been the world’s arms-makers.  With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic organization could make the most of their resources in men and material.

More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots, though no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in France or wherever they were needed overseas.  If no magic could put rifles in their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent.  Perhaps we should have done better.  No one can know until we try it.  If liberal treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English were; this, too, only war can decide.