Like you, we had, at the outbreak of war, some 500,000 men, all told, of whom not half were fully trained.  None of us British folk will ever forget the Rally of the First Hundred Thousand!  On the 8th of August, four days after the Declaration of War, Lord Kitchener asked for them.  He got them in a fortnight.  But the stream rushed on—­in the fifth week of the war alone 250,000 men enlisted; 30,000 recruits—­the yearly number enlisted before the war—­joined in one day.  Within six or seven weeks the half-million available at the beginning of the war had been more than doubled.

Then came a pause.  The War Office, snowed under, not knowing where to turn for clothes, boots, huts, rifles, guns, ammunition, tried to check the stream by raising the recruits’ standards.  A mistake!—­but soon recognised.  In another month, under the influence of the victory on the Marne, and while the Germans were preparing the attacks on the British Line so miraculously beaten off in the first battle of Ypres, the momentary check had been lost in a fresh outburst of national energy.  You will remember how the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee came into being, that first autumn?—­how the Prime Minister took the lead, and the two great political parties of the country agreed to bring all their organisation, central or local, to bear on the supreme question of getting men for the Army.  Tory and Radical toured the country together.  The hottest opponents stood on the same platform. L’union sacree—­to use the French phrase, so vivid and so true, by which our great Ally has charmed her own discords to rest in defence of the country—­became a reality here too, in spite of strikes, in spite of Ireland.

By July 1915—­the end of the first year of war—­more than 2,000,000 men had voluntarily enlisted.  But the military chiefs knew well that it was but a half-way house.  They knew, too, that it was not enough to get men and rush them out to the trenches as soon as any kind of training could be given them.  The available men must be sorted out.  Some, indeed, must be brought back from the fighting line for work as vital as the fighting itself.

So Registration came—­the first real step towards organising the nation. 150,000 voluntary workers helped to register all men and women in the country, from eighteen to sixty-five, and on the results Lord Derby built his group system, which almost enabled us to do without compulsion.  Between October and December 1915, another two million and a quarter men had “attested”—­that is, had pledged themselves to come up for training when called on.