pon the world. For
two strenuous decades the British navy had been growing enormously under
the pressure of German naval preparations, but the British military
establishment had experienced no corresponding expansion. It was true
there had been a futile, rather foolishly conducted agitation for
universal military service, but there had been no accumulation of
material, no preparation of armament-making machinery, no planning and
no foundations for any sort of organisation that would have facilitated
the rapid expansion of the fighting forces of a country in a time of
crisis. Such an idea was absolutely antagonistic to the mental habits of
the British military caste. The German method of incorporating all the
strength and resources of the country into one national fighting machine
was quite strange to the British military mind--still. Even after a
month of war. War had become the comprehensive business of the German
nation; to the British it was an incidental adventure. In Germany the
nation was militarised, in England the army was specialised. The nation
for nearly every practical purpose got along without it. Just as
political life had also become specialised.... Now suddenly we wanted a
government to speak for every one, and an army of the whole people. How
were we to find it?

Mr. Britling dwelt upon this idea of the specialised character of the
British army and navy and government. It seemed to him to be the clue to
everything that was jarring in the London spectacle. The army had been a
thing aloof, for a special end. It had developed all the characteristics
of a caste. It had very high standards along the lines of its
specialisation, but it was inadaptable and conservative. Its
exclusiveness was not so much a deliberate culture as a consequence of
its detached function. It touched the ordinary social body chiefly
through three other specialised bodies, the court, the church, and the
stage. Apart from that it saw the great unofficial civilian world as
something vague, something unsympathetic, something possibly
antagonistic, which it comforted itself by snubbing when it dared and
tricking when it could, something that projected members of Parliament
towards it and was stingy about money. Directly one grasped how apart
the army lived from the ordinary life of the community, from
industrialism or from economic necessities, directly one understood that
the great mass of Englishmen were simply "outsiders" to the War Of