forty-two which were all that could be put into the field.  The difficulty was got over by the organization of eighteen of the ninety-nine into training brigades, and the additional men needed for the mobilization of eighty-one fighting batteries were thus obtained.  No doubt some of the artillery officers did not like being set to training work, and complained that they were being reduced.  But it was a reduction from unreal work of parade in order to double fighting efficiency.  Not a man or a gun of the regular horse and field artillery was ever reduced in any shape or form, and not only were the effective batteries largely increased, but over 150 serviceable batteries were created and made part of the Second Line, or Territorial, Army.  This was a force which could be used either for home defense or for expansion of an expeditionary force of Regulars.  The Militia, which was not under obligation to serve abroad, was abolished, and its substance was converted into third regular battalions, organized for the purpose of training and providing drafts to meet the wastage of war in the first and second regular battalions of their regiments.  Some of those third battalions are said to have trained and sent out as many as twelve thousand men apiece in the course of the war.

All these things were done under the direction of such young and modern soldiers as Sir Douglas Haig on the General Staff side, and as Sir John Cowans on the administrative side.  Both of these officers were brought home from India for the purpose.  Sir Herbert Miles, as Quartermaster-General, and Sir Stanley von Donop, as Master-General of the Ordnance also rendered much help.  The newly organized General Staff thought the plans out under the direction, first of Sir Neville Lyttelton, and then of Sir William Nicholson, its successive chiefs.  The latter and Sir Douglas Haig in addition worked out, in consultation with the representatives of the Dominions, the organization of their troops in units and with staffs and weapons corresponding as nearly as was practicable to our own.  Systematic conferences between the British and Dominion War and other Ministers prepared the ground for this.  Sir Wilfrid Laurier and General Botha and others of the Dominion Ministers came to London and co-operated.

It is sometimes said that all these things were very well, but that we should have at once raised a much larger army, as in the course of the war we ultimately had to do.  The answer is that in a time of peace we could not possibly have raised a large army on the Continental scale.  If we had tried to we should have made a miserable and possibly disastrous failure.  The utmost we could do toward it was to provide the organization in which the comparatively small force which was all we could create might be expanded after a war broke out.

How this nucleus organization, on the basis of which the later expansions took place, was fashioned so as to afford a general pattern, anyone may see who chooses to expend a shilling on the purchase of the little volume called “Field Service Regulations, Part II.”  This piece of work took nearly three years to prepare.  With the organization of which I have spoken, which was made in accordance with its principles, the whole of the task of recasting the British Army was performed by 1911.