To say, therefore, that we were caught unprepared is not accurate.  Compulsory service in a period of peace was out of the question for us.  Moreover, it would have taken at least two generations to organize, and meanwhile we should have been weaker than without it.  We had studied the situation and had done the only thing we thought we could do, after full deliberation.  Our main strength was in our Navy and its tradition.  Our secondary contribution was a small army fashioned to fulfil a scientifically measured function.  It was, of course, a very small army, but it had a scientific organization on the basis of which a great expansion was possible.  After all, what we set ourselves to accomplish we did accomplish.  If the margin by which a just sufficient success was attained in the early days of the war seems to-day narrow, the reason of the narrow margin lay largely in the unprepared condition of the armies of Russia, on which we and France had reckoned for rapid co-operation.  Anyhow, we fulfilled our contract, for at eleven o’clock on Monday morning, August 3, 1914, we mobilized without a hitch the whole of the Expeditionary Force, amounting to six divisions and nearly two cavalry divisions, and began its transport over the Channel when war was declared thirty-six hours later.  We also at the same time successfully mobilized the Territorial Force and other units, the whole amounting to over half a million men.  The Navy was already in its war stations, and there was no delay at all in putting what we had prepared into operation.

I speak of this with direct knowledge, for as the Prime Minister, who was holding temporarily the seals of the War Secretary, was overwhelmed with business, he asked me, tho I had then become Lord Chancellor, to go to the War Office and give directions for the mobilization of the machinery with which I was so familiar, and I did this on the morning of Monday, August 3, and a day later handed it over, in working order, to Lord Kitchener.

I now return to what was the main object of British foreign policy between 1905 and 1914, the prevention of the danger of any outbreak with Germany.  Sir Edward Grey worked strenuously with this well-defined object.  If France were overrun, our island security would be at least diminished, and he had, therefore, in addition to his anxiety to avert a general war, a direct national interest to strive for, in the preservation of peace between Germany and France.  Ever since the mutilation which the latter country had suffered, as the outcome of the War of 1870, she had felt sore, and her relations with Germany were not easy.  But she did not seek a war of revenge.  It would have been too full of risk even if she had not desired peace, the Franco-Russian Dual Alliance notwithstanding.  The notion of an encirclement of Germany, excepting in defense against aggression by Germany herself, existed only in the minds of nervous Germans.  Still, there was suspicion, and the question was, how to get rid of it.