we should have been very foolish. Our navy would inevitably have
been diminished and deteriorated. You can not ride two horses at once,
and no more can you possess in their integrity two great conflicting
military traditions.

But what I am saying does not rest on my own conclusions alone. In the
year 1912 the then Chief of the General Staff told me that he and the
General Staff would like to investigate, as a purely military problem,
the question whether we could or could not raise a great army. I thought
this a reasonable inquiry and sanctioned and found money for it, only
stipulating that they should consult with the Administrative Staffs when
assembling the materials for the investigation. The outcome was embodied
in a report made to me by Lord Nicholson, himself a soldier who had a
strong desire for compulsory service and a large army. He reported, as
the result of a prolonged and careful investigation, that, alike as
regarded officers and as regarded buildings and equipment, the
conclusion of the General Staff was that it would be in a high degree
unwise to try, during a period of unrest on the Continent, to commence a
new military system. It could not be built up excepting after much
unavoidable delay. We might at once experience a falling off in
voluntary recruiting, and so become seriously weaker before we had a
chance of becoming stronger. And the temptation to a foreign General
Staff to make an early end of what it might insist on interpreting as
preparation for aggression on our part would be too strong to be risked.
What we should get might prove to be a mob in place of an army. I quite
agreed, and not the less because it was highly improbable that the
country would have looked at anything of the sort.

What we actually could produce in the form of an army had to be
estimated, not as if we were standing alone, but as being an adjunct to
what was possessed by France and Russia. They had large armies and small
navies. We had a large navy and a small army. When these were considered
in conjunction, I do not think that the hope of some of our best
military authorities, that an aggressive attempt by the Central Powers
could be made abortive, was an over-sanguine one.

Much of what we did owe for the excellence of the Expeditionary Force,
such as it was in point of size, and much of what we have since owed for
the excellence of the great armies that we subsequently raised, was due
to the unbroken work of the f