int they go out to the little army which is
to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a
world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves. I am
not at all certain that either the British or the American officer works
as hard as the German in time of peace. Neither has the practical
incentive nor the determined driver behind him.

For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for example,
Lord Kitchener. Those British officers who applied themselves in
peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with
the day's routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen;
practise manoeuvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions,
corps, and armies. They became the rallying points in the concourse
of untrained recruits.

German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen.
The Great War could not take them by surprise. They took the road
with a machine whose parts had been long assembled. They had
been trained for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under
the whip of a definite anticipation.

A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff
work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become
an instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their
situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material
ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material one
admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine. One
had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and the
American Press at the outset of the war to realize how vague was the
truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or
American--but not to the trained British Staff.

So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one to
twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help save
Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in the
immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar, from
Agincourt, Blenheim and Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and
Hussars, Highlanders and Lowlanders, kilts and breeks, Connaught
Rangers and Royal Fusiliers, Duke of Wellington's and Prince of
Wales' Own, come again to Flanders. The best blood of England was
leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British aristocracy is or is not, it
never forgets its duty to the England of its fathers. It is never ingrate
to its fortune. The time had