ed during the first months of the war.

In the first place--accommodation! At the opening of war we had
barrack-room for 176,000 men. What to do with these capped, bare-headed,
or straw-hatted multitudes who poured in at Lord Kitchener's call! They
were temporarily housed--somehow--under every kind of shelter. But
military huts for half a million men were immediately planned--then for
nearly a million.

Timber--labour--lighting--water--drainage--roads--everything, had to be
provided, and was provided. Billeting filled up the gaps, and large
camps were built by private enterprise to be taken in time by the
Government. Of course mistakes were made. Of course there were some
dishonest contractors and some incompetent officials. But the breath,
the winnowing blast of the national need was behind it all. By the end
of the first year of war, the "problem of quartering the troops in the
chief training centres had been solved."

In the next place, there were no clothes. A dozen manufacturers of khaki
cloth existed before the war. They had to be pushed up as quickly as
possible to 200. Which of us in the country districts does not remember
the blue emergency suits, of which a co-operative society was able by a
lucky stroke to provide 400,000 for the new recruits?--or the other
motley coverings of the hosts that drilled in our fields and marched
about our lanes? The War Office Notes, under my hand, speak of these
months as the "tatterdemalion stage." For what clothes and boots there
were must go to the men at the Front, and the men at home had just to
take their chance.

Well! It took a year and five months--breathless months of strain and
stress--while Germany was hammering East and West on the long-drawn
lines of the Allies. But by then, January 1916, the Army was not only
clothed, housed, and very largely armed, but we were manufacturing for
our Allies.

As to the arms and equipment, look back at these facts. When the
Expeditionary Force had taken its rifles abroad in August 1914, 150,000
rifles were left in the country, and many of them required to be
resighted. The few Service rifles in each battalion were handed round
"as the Three Fates handed round their one eye, in the story of
Perseus"; old rifles, and inferior rifles "technically known as D.P.,"
were eagerly made use of. But after seven months' hard training with
nothing better than these makeshifts, "men were apt to get depressed."

It was just the same with th