n
for the manufacture of rifles and guns. She had everything necessary
for supplying her navy, but ridiculously inadequate plants for
supplying a force of soldiers so immense. Thus England had scores of
battalions of excellently drilled soldiers prepared to go to France
before there were any rifles for them to fight with, or before they
had the all-important artillery for their support in battle.

In the early months of the war probably she was not awake to the
necessity of the situation. Besides, her manufacturers, still
confident of an early victory over Germany, were more interested in
permanently gaining markets which the Germans would lose than in
making munitions. The war was not brought home to the Englishman as
it was to the German and the Frenchman, by having bloody lines of
trenches on his own soil. Every British soldier was fighting across
the seas in the defense of the soil of another nation. Naturally, in
many cases, he was slow to a realization that this also was his own
national defense. But by the volunteer system alone, England
enlisted over two million men before conscription was threatened.

In order to centralize authority under a single man, Lord Kitchener
was intrusted with the stupendous task of organizing the new army
and seeing that it was properly equipped. He had foreseen at the
start that the war would be long and that it would be nearly two
years before England could throw anything like an armed force
adequately representing her population into the struggle on the
Continent. He had to train his officers at the same time that he
trained his men and build guns and make rifles.

Meanwhile, the German army system was complete. Indeed, there was no
want of men with military experience in any one of the continental
countries to act as drill masters. England was attempting a feat
equaled only in our Civil War, where vast armies of untrained men
were raised. But in this case, the enemy was not composed also of
recruits, but of men trained under universal service by a staff
which had traditions of preparedness as a basis for the preparation
before the war, while the British staff and the British army had
been trained in the handling of small, mobile forces in policing
their empire. But as the months wore on, it was evident that the
military decision of the war might rest with this new army when the
other armies were exhausted, when at last it reached the front in
full force with adequate arms and