f the
Staff College who had had experience in every branch, he was supposed to
know how each branch should be run.

When I returned to the front, my first motor trip which took me along
the lines of communication revealed the transformation, the more
appreciable because of my absence, which the winter had wrought. The New
Army had come into its own. And I had seen this New Army in the making.
I had seen Kitchener's first hundred thousand at work on Salisbury Plain
under old, retired drillmasters who, however eager, were hazy about
modern tactics. The men under them had the spirit which will endure the
drudgery of training. With time they must learn to be soldiers. More raw
material, month after month, went into the hopper. The urgent call of
the recruiting posters and the press had, in the earlier stages of the
war, supplied all the volunteers which could be utilized. It took much
longer to prepare equipment and facilities than to get men to enlist.
New Army battalions which reached the front in August, 1915, had had
their rifles only for a month. Before rifles could be manufactured rifle
plants had to be constructed. As late as December, 1915, the United
States were shipping only five thousand rifles a week to the British.
Soldiers fully drilled in the manual of arms were waiting for the arms
with which to fight; but once the supply of munitions from the new
plants was started it soon became a flood.

All winter the New Army battalions had been arriving in France. With
them had come the complicated machinery which modern war requires. The
staggering quantity of it was better proof than figures on the shipping
list of the immense tonnage which goes to sea under the British flag.
The old life at the front, as we knew it, was no more. When I first saw
the British Army in France it held seventeen miles of line. Only
seventeen, but seventeen in the mire of Flanders, including the bulge of
the Ypres salient.

By the first of January, 1915, a large proportion of the officers and
men of the original Expeditionary Force had perished. Reservists had
come to take the vacant places. Officers and non-commissioned officers
who survived had to direct a fighting army in the field and to train a
new army at home. An offensive was out of the question. All that the
force in the trenches could do was to hold. When the world wondered why
it could not do more, those who knew the true state of affairs wondered
how it could do so much. Wit