er of armament. Rightly or wrongly--most people
probably now think wrongly--H.M. Government of pre-war days merely
contemplated placing in the field for offensive purposes a force of
six, or at the outside, seven divisions, with their complement of
mounted troops. Leaving the Germans out of consideration, our
Expeditionary Force of six divisions was upon the whole as well
equipped in respect to armament (apart from ammunition reserves) as
any one of the armies that were placed in the field in August 1914. It
only failed in respect to two items, heavy ordnance and high-explosive
shell for the field-guns, and in respect to field-howitzers and heavy
field-guns (the 60-pounders) it was better off than any, including the
German forces.

It will perhaps be urged that we were deplorably badly-off for
machine-guns, and so in a sense we were. But what were the facts? The
Expeditionary Force was better fitted out with this class of weapon
than any one of the embattled armies at the outset of the war, with
the exception of the German. Ex-Kaiser William's hosts enjoyed a
tremendous advantage in respect to machine-guns, but they enjoyed that
advantage to an even greater extent over the French and Russian
legions than over ours. No action on the part of the German Great
General Staff before the conflict reflects greater credit upon their
prescience, than does their recognition in the time of peace of the
great part that the mitrailleuse was capable of playing in
contemporary warfare. The quantities of these weapons with which our
principal antagonist took the field was a complete surprise to all;
these were far in excess of the "establishment" that had been
acknowledged and which was the same as our own. As a matter of fact we
were better off for them, relatively, than the French, or
Austro-Hungarians, or Russians. To say that the question of
machine-guns had been neglected by us before the war either from the
point of view of tactics or of supply, is almost as unfair as it would
be to allege that the question of Tanks had been neglected by the
Germans before the Battle of the Somme. In the course of the debate in
the House over the Munitions Bill in the early summer of 1915, Sir F.
Cawley stated that we were short of machine-guns at the beginning of
the war, and that none had been provided; the first charge was made
under a misapprehension, and the second charge was contrary to the
fact because a number of entirely new units had be