better part of a hundred years. The
German people had been educated for the war, taught to regard the war as
their brightest hope, to concentrate their imagination on what it might
do for them, and to devote their energies to carrying it through. The
movement of so great a mass of opinion and zeal, when once it has begun,
is not soon reversed. Germany settled down to the business of winning
the war. The Germans had had some partial successes, in the destruction
of a Russian army at Tannenberg, and of a British squadron at Coronel.
They began to realize the immensity of their task, but they still
believed that they could perform it, and that if they could not beat
down the opposing forces, they could wear them down.

Month by month, as the war continued, it spread, and involved nation
after nation. In the first summer Japan came in, and in the first
autumn, Turkey. As the number of Germany's enemies increased, so did the
tale of Great Britain's responsibilities. British troops, during the
course of the war, fought upon every front, against every one of the
Powers allied to Germany; British help in men, or money or material, was
given to every one of Germany's enemies. Already in August 1914 British
naval and military forces were operating in Togoland, in the Cameroons,
and at Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa. By November Basra, in the
Persian Gulf, was occupied, and the Mesopotamian campaign had begun. In
addition to all these new burdens, the anxieties of administration in
many countries, and especially in Egypt, which owed allegiance to the
Sultan, were increased tenfold by the war. Those who had pleased
themselves with the fancy that Great Britain is an island were rudely
undeceived.

Aircraft had proved their utility, or rather their necessity, in the
campaign on the western front; they were not less needed in all these
distant theatres. In uncivilized or thinly peopled countries a single
squadron of aeroplanes may save the work of whole battalions of
infantry. The great problem of the first year of the war was a problem
of manufacture and training, the problem, indeed, of the creation of
values. With the instruments that we had at the outbreak of war we had
done all that we could, and more than all that we had promised; but what
we had achieved, at the best, was something very like a deadlock. The
war, if it was to be won, could only be won in the workshop and the
training-school. These places are not much in t