iled as a
transcendent triumph and was placarded on misleading posters. When
mishaps occurred--as they too often did--their seriousness was
whittled down or ignored. The public took their cue only too readily
from the newspapers, and the consequence was that a check was placed
alike on recruiting and on the production of the war material which
was urgently required for such troops as we could place in the field.

And yet, journalists could plead in excuse that they were in some
measure following a lead set by the authorities. It has already been
admitted in Chapter II. that a system of official secretiveness in
connection with reverses was adopted, and that it did no good. This
took the form of concealing, or at any rate minimizing, sets-back when
these occurred--an entirely new attitude for soldiers in this country
to take up, and one which was to be deprecated. We should never have
gathered together those swarms of volunteers in South Africa in 1900,
volunteers drawn from the United Kingdom and from the Dominions and
from the Colonies, had Stormberg and Magersfontein and Colenso been
artistically camouflaged. The facts were blurted out. The Empire rose
to the occasion. Hiding the truth in 1914-15 was a blunder from every
point of view, because there never was the slightest fear of the
people of this country losing heart. No doubt the incorporation of
ordinances directed against the propagation of alarmist reports
calculated to cause despondency, as part of the Defence of the Realm
Act, was necessary. But one at times positively welcomed the
appearance of well-informed jeremiads in the newspapers, as an
antidote to the exultant cackle which was hindering a genuine,
comprehensive, universal mobilization of our national resources in men
and material.

This excessive optimism which did so much harm was, it should be
observed, to some extent the handiwork of "experts" whose names
carried a certain amount of weight, who turned out several columns of
comment weekly, and whose opinions would have been well enough worth
having had they been better acquainted with the actual facts. For one
thing, they did not realize that the augmentation of our military
forces was hampered by the virtual impossibility of synchronizing
development in output of equipment and munitions with the expansion
of numbers in the ranks. They were, moreover, entirely unaware of the
unfortunate condition of the Russian armies in respect to war
material;