But, as every observer of this new England knows, we have here less than half the story.  From a nation not invaded, protected, on the contrary, by its sea ramparts from the personal cruelties and ravages of war, to gather in between four and five million voluntary recruits was a great achievement.  But to turn these recruits at the shortest possible notice, under the hammer-blows of a war, in which our enemies had every initial advantage, into armies equipped and trained according to modern standards, might well have seemed to those who undertook it an impossible task.  And the task had to be accomplished, the riddle solved, before, in the face of the enemy, the incredible difficulties of it could possibly be admitted.  The creators of the new armies worked, as far as they could, behind a screen.  But now the screen is down, and we are allowed to see their difficulties in their true perspective—­as they existed during the first months of the war.

In the first place—­accommodation!  At the opening of war we had barrack-room for 176,000 men.  What to do with these capped, bare-headed, or straw-hatted multitudes who poured in at Lord Kitchener’s call!  They were temporarily housed—­somehow—­under every kind of shelter.  But military huts for half a million men were immediately planned—­then for nearly a million.

Timber—­labour—­lighting—­w
ater—­drainage—­roads—­everything, had to be provided, and was provided.  Billeting filled up the gaps, and large camps were built by private enterprise to be taken in time by the Government.  Of course mistakes were made.  Of course there were some dishonest contractors and some incompetent officials.  But the breath, the winnowing blast of the national need was behind it all.  By the end of the first year of war, the “problem of quartering the troops in the chief training centres had been solved.”

In the next place, there were no clothes.  A dozen manufacturers of khaki cloth existed before the war.  They had to be pushed up as quickly as possible to 200.  Which of us in the country districts does not remember the blue emergency suits, of which a co-operative society was able by a lucky stroke to provide 400,000 for the new recruits?—­or the other motley coverings of the hosts that drilled in our fields and marched about our lanes?  The War Office Notes, under my hand, speak of these months as the “tatterdemalion stage.”  For what clothes and boots there were must go to the men at the Front, and the men at home had just to take their chance.

Well!  It took a year and five months—­breathless months of strain and stress—­while Germany was hammering East and West on the long-drawn lines of the Allies.  But by then, January 1916, the Army was not only clothed, housed, and very largely armed, but we were manufacturing for our Allies.

As to the arms and equipment, look back at these facts.  When the Expeditionary Force had taken its rifles abroad in August 1914, 150,000 rifles were left in the country, and many of them required to be resighted.  The few Service rifles in each battalion were handed round “as the Three Fates handed round their one eye, in the story of Perseus”; old rifles, and inferior rifles “technically known as D.P.,” were eagerly made use of.  But after seven months’ hard training with nothing better than these makeshifts, “men were apt to get depressed.”