The year 1915 saw great and continuous advance.  During that year, an average number of over a million troops were being trained in the United Kingdom, apart from the armies abroad.  The First, Second, and Third Armies naturally came off much better than the Fourth and Fifth, who were yet being recruited all the time.  What equipment, clothes and arms there were the first three armies got; the rest had to wait.  But all the same, the units of these later armies were doing the best they could for themselves all the time; nobody stood still.  And gradually—­surely—­order was evolved out of the original chaos.  The Army Orders of the past had dropped out of sight with the beginning of the war.  Everything had to be planned anew.  The one governing factor was the “necessity of getting men to the front at the earliest possible moment.”  Six months’ courses were laid down for all arms.  It was very rare, however, that any course could be strictly carried out, and after the first three armies, the training of the rest seemed, for a time, to be all beginnings!—­with the final stage farther and farther away.  And always the same difficulty of guns, rifles, huts, and the rest.

But, like its own tanks, the War Office went steadily on, negotiating one obstacle after another.  Special courses for special subjects began to be set up.  Soon artillery officers had no longer to join their batteries at once on appointment; R.E. officers could be given a seven weeks’ training at Chatham; little enough, “for a man supposed to know the use and repairs of telephones and telegraphs, or the way to build or destroy a bridge, or how to meet the countless other needs with which a sapper is called upon to deal!” Increasing attention was paid to staff training and staff courses.  And insufficient as it all was, for months, the general results of this haphazard training, when the men actually got into the field—­all short-comings and disappointments admitted—­were nothing short of wonderful.  Had the Germans forgotten that we are and always have been a fighting people?  That fact, at any rate, was brought home to them by the unbroken spirit of the troops who held the line in France and Flanders in 1915 against all attempts to break through; and at Neuve Chapelle, or Loos, or a hundred other minor engagements, only wanted numbers and ammunition—­above all ammunition!—­to win them the full victory they had rightly earned.

Of this whole earlier stage, the junior subaltern was the leading figure.  It was he—­let me insist upon it anew—­whose spirit made the new armies.  If the tender figure of the “Lady of the Lamp” has become for many of us the chief symbol of the Crimean struggle, when Britain comes to embody in sculpture or in painting that which has touched her most deeply in this war, she will choose—­surely—­the figure of a boy of nineteen, laughing, eager, undaunted, as quick to die as to live, carrying in his young hands the “Luck” of England.