Nothing less than the whole history of the past eighteen months!—­beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and so ignorantly reproached.  At the word “Belgium” on August 4th, practically the whole English nation fell into line.  We felt no doubts—­we knew what we had to do.  But the problem was how to do it.  Outside the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew it.  The fact is more than our justification—­it is our glory.  If we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane men have behaved as we did in the years before the war?—­233,000 men on active service—­and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany’s millions!—­with arsenals and equipment to match.  Is it any wonder that the country—­our untouched, uninvaded country—­safe as it believed itself to be under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to which—­for the faith of treaties’ sake, for self-defence’s sake—­it was committed?

And yet—­was it after all so slow?  The day after war was declared the Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of half a million of men to the Army, and a first war credit of a hundred millions of money (five hundred million dollars).  The first hundred thousand men came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days.  By September 4th nearly three hundred thousand fresh men had enlisted—­by Christmas half a million.  By May, a million men had been added to the new Armies; by September, 1915, Sir John French alone had under his command close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in December, 1915, the addition of another million men to the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing up the British military strength to approximately four millions, excluding Colonials.  And what of the Dominions?  By November, 1915, Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces more than equal to the whole of that original Expeditionary Force, that “contemptible little army” which, broken and strained as it was by the sheer weight and fierceness of the German advance, yet held the gates of the Channel till England could fling her fresh troops into the field, and France—­admirable France!—­had recovered from the first onslaught of her terrible and ruthless enemy.