We haven’t these officers, and we can’t make them in a hurry.  It takes at least five years to make an officer who knows his trade.  It needs a special gift, in addition to that knowledge, to make a man able to impart it.  And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter, because India and our other vast areas of service and opportunity overseas drain away a large proportion of just those able and educated men who would in other countries gravitate towards the army.  Such small wealth of officers as we have—­and I am quite prepared to believe that the officers we have are among the very best in the world—­are scarcely enough to go round our present supply of private soldiers.  And the best and most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon more and more for aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highly specialised services which are manifestly destined to be the real fighting forces of the future.  We cannot spare the best of our officers for training conscripts; we shall get the dismallest results from the worst of them; and so even if it were a vital necessity for our country to have an army of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and it would be a mere last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means at our disposal.

But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not want such an army.  I believe that the vast masses of men in uniform maintained by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormously overrated as fighting machines.  I see Germany in the likeness of a boxer with a mailed fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I am convinced that when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted, the whole disproportionate system will topple over.  The military ascendancy of the future lies with the country that dares to experiment most, that experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting force fit and admirable and small and flexible.  The experience of war during the last fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormous defensive power of small, scientifically handled bodies of men.  These huge conscript armies are made up not of masses of military muscle, but of a huge proportion of military fat.  Their one way of fighting will be to fall upon an antagonist with all their available weight, and if he is mobile and dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they will become a mere embarrassment to their own people.  Modern weapons and modern contrivance are continually decreasing the number of men who can be employed efficiently upon a length of front.  I doubt if there is any use for more than 400,000 men upon the whole Franco-Belgian frontier at the present time.  Such an army, properly supplied, could—­so far as terrestrial forces are concerned—­hold that frontier against any number of assailants.  The bigger the forces brought against it the sooner the exhaustion of the attacking power.  Now, it is for employment upon that frontier, and for no other conceivable purpose in the world, that Great Britain is asked to create a gigantic conscript army.