been acting as knaves if they had been drawing their salaries and
had not earned them by making themselves acquainted with facts which
it was their bounden duty to know. They had been acting as liars if,
when fully aware of the German preparations for aggressive war and of
what these portended, they had deliberately deceived and hoodwinked
the countrymen who trusted them. (Personally, I should be disposed to
acquit them of having been fools or knaves--but I may be wrong.)
Several Ministers had indeed deliberately stated in their places in
Parliament that the nation's military arrangements were not framed to
meet anything beyond the despatch to an oversea theatre of war of four
out of the six divisions of our Expeditionary Force! One of the gang
had even been unable "to conceive circumstances in which continental
operations by our troops would not be a crime against the people of
this country."

Much has been said and written since 1914 concerning the unpreparedness
of the army for war. But the truth is that the army was not
unprepared for that limited-liability, pill-to-stop-an-earthquake
theory of making war which represented the programme of Mr. Asquith
and his colleagues before the blow fell. Take it all round, the
Expeditionary Force was as efficient as any allied or hostile army
which took the field. It was almost as well prepared for the supreme
test in respect to equipment as it was in respect to leadership and
training. The country and the Government, not the army, were
unprepared. There was little wrong with the military forces except
that they represented merely a drop in the ocean, that they
constituted no more than an advanced guard to legions which did not
exist. Still one must acknowledge that (as will be pointed out further
on) even some of our highest military authorities did not realize what
an insignificant asset our splendid little Expeditionary Force would
stand for in a great European war, nor to have grasped when the crash
came that the matter of paramount importance in connection with the
conduct of the struggle on land was the creation of a host of fighting
men reaching such dimensions as to render it competent to play a
really vital role in achieving victory for the Entente.

As it happened, I had proceeded as a private individual in the month
of June 1914 to inspect the German railway developments directed
towards the frontiers of Belgium and of Luxemburg. This was an
illuminating, indeed an