open mind. He was something new, a great reserve of strength. His name seemed to guarantee success. His mere readiness to attempt the creation of a vast army in time of war persuaded others that it was feasible.

To the creation of the New Armies there are only two parallels, the American Civil War and the French Revolution. But in neither instance were the difficulties and dangers so great. The North, vastly superior in material resources, faced an enemy equally ill-prepared. The French opposed a coalition divided by political jealousies and imbued with obsolescent military traditions; moreover, in 1793, warfare depended little on materials and elaborate equipment, and no infantry battalions were kept back from the front then because their affiliated artillery had not received their guns. The full meaning of Kitchener's task was hardly apparent at the outset to many who took part in it. It is only now that a retrospect of August and September 1914 reveals the vastness of the undertaking, the magnitude of the achievement, and the courage needed in the man who called upon the country to undertake it. It is to be hoped that some day a full account of the making of the New Armies will be produced, filling in details where Sir George Arthur unfortunately has only traced outlines, and giving an adequate picture of the difficulties against which the organiser of the New Armies had to contend. It would rival, both in interest and value, the record of their great achievements in the field. It is easy now to indicate mistakes. For instance, it was a serious error to allow so much splendid officer material to go to the front and be expended in the ranks of Yeomanry and Territorial units; no Staff College graduates should have been allowed to go out as mere company and platoon commanders in the Expeditionary Force; the Officer Cadet Battalions should have been started at least twelve months earlier. But, considering the emergency and the hurry, it is marvellous there were not more mistakes. The question of expansion had apparently never been considered, despite the Elgin Commission's recommendations; or two General Staff Officers working for a couple of months might have examined and settled many of the throng of details that clamoured for solution in August 1914. Kitchener had to start from Vol. 234.-No. 465.

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the absolute beginnings, in a willing but naked land; and, in comparison with his achievement, even serious errors in detail are negligible.

But, while the new Armies were being trained there was more to be done. To develop the vast resources, human and material, of the unarmed and unready British Empire was itself a Herculean task. Kitchener attempted to shoulder the additional burden of directing the employment of our existing forces, to guide the strategy of the Empire as well as to arm it for war. His task was all the harder because on the outbreak of war the General Staff had practically dispersed. Most of its members went overseas with the Expeditionary Force; and the new Secretary of State found himself without the expert advice for which he might have looked (III, 6, cf. 13). Sir Ian Hamilton speaks (1, 11) of 'K.'s horror' of being War Minister or Commander-inChief; now he is both.' The double rôle, too much for any one man, was particularly so for one who, as Sir George Arthur admits, had been too much absorbed in the East to study in detail the problems of the West. And, full as his hands were with the New Army, his other anxieties were even more urgent. Even after the first crisis was past, and the Marne, followed by Ypres, had given the British Empire the chance to develop its resources, the situation remained perilous. We had to maintain and supply our existing forces and to assist our allies to hold our enemy in check until such time as the British Empire could throw its full weight into the scale. Till then the paramount necessity was to maintain an unbroken defence; and, though hopes were entertained of reaching a successful issue earlier, Kitchener's plans were framed to make certain in the long run. But with the Germans within sixty miles of Paris, French opinion naturally favoured an earlier effort to expel the enemy (cf. III, 224); and a purely defensive strategy had its own perils. To leave the initiative entirely to the enemy was a policy no soldier would willingly adopt, calculated to discourage troops and civilians, to say nothing of allies and possible allies. The offensives of 1915 may have been premature and disappointing, but were not therefore necessarily avoidable or without justification. How far their failure, so far as they did fail, was due to

misdirection of effort, how far to inadequacy of material, is a question with which Lord Kitchener's biography is naturally concerned.

Serious as was the lack of trained men, the difficulties of providing guns, ammunition, and many articles of equipment were even acuter. It was no good crying out, What shall we spend to be saved?' The nation had plunged into Armageddon without armaments; and worse even than the lack of munitions was the lack of means of producing them. The things that were wanted took months and even years to produce. Kitchener's plight was that of the chef who to produce an omelette must first establish a poultry farm' (III, 265). On the much-disputed question of munitions, Sir George Arthur establishes an excellent case, successfully refuting those who have tried to lay at Lord Kitchener's door the inadequacy of our munitions and our consequent checks on the Western front in 1915 (cf. chap. cxxv and cxxvi). That Lord Kitchener and the War Office were early alive to the need for heavy guns, for machine-guns, and for high explosives is clear (III, 266). The Ministry of Munitions undoubtedly did splendid work, but not till 1916 did its efforts begin to produce real effect (III, 288); and all the supplies available for Loos were the work of the War Office. Trade Union regulations and the enlistment of real 'indispensables' no doubt hampered output in the early days; an earlier adoption of National Registration (advocated by the 'Spectator' almost at the outset) would have been an advantage; but an important reason why deliveries of guns and ammunition fell short of expectations was the failure to co-ordinate; different contractors were calculating on the same sources for raw materials (cf. III, 267). That a system of 'rationing raw materials might have obviated this is easy to see now, but not therefore reasonable to expect of 1914.

That Lord Kitchener was always happy in his strategy can hardly be maintained, and to assert that he made no blunders, no decisions of doubtful wisdom, is the more futile because, whatever his errors, his services far outweigh them. Strategy was not his special province; he had never been through the Staff College; neither on the Nile nor in South Africa had his experiences prepared him for the problems of a

European war. Indeed it is something of a paradox that, while he was called to his great task largely because he was a soldier, it was as a statesman, the leader and inspirer of his country's efforts, in the broad lines of policy rather than in the more technical sphere, that he achieved most. But it is not in connexion with the Western front that he can reasonably be criticised. With all his knowledge of the East he was never under any delusion as to the true relation between the Western and the Eastern spheres; he knew that enterprises in the East could only be justified in so far as they would contribute appreciably to success in the vital Western theatre (cf. III, 111). From the outset he was firm on absolutely harmonious co-operation with the French. 'We must at all hazards support our Allies' was the keynote of his policy; there must be no operating on our own (III, 36, cf. 50). It was on this account that, on receiving the telegram of Aug. 31, announcing Lord French's intention to withdraw his troops from the front line, he hurried to Paris for the celebrated interview of Sept. 1. Sir George Arthur's version, most judiciously given, is not easy to reconcile in every detail with Lord French's 1914,' but it is impossible not to feel that a grave blunder, political and military, was averted, and that Lord French was hardly doing himself or his troops justice by the proposal, or when he declared his force unfit to withstand an attack by one German army corps (cf. III, 52). Haig's First Corps, at any rate, which had not been engaged in more than rear-guard actions, could surely have given an excellent account of its own number of Germans, who, after all, would have been no more fresh or at full strength than the men they were pursuing. What would the 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers and the rest of the Third (Brandenburg) Corps have been worth in an attack after their bitter experiences at Mons, so vividly related in Walter Bloem's 'Vormarsch'? Lord Kitchener's intervention, then, would seem to have been fully justified, nor does it appear to have interfered with the harmonious and friendly relations between the Commander-in-Chief and the War Secretary to which Lord French's many letters here quoted afford ample testimony. It may be added that, when the Government decided to replace Lord French in

the command in France by a soldier who, in Sir George Arthur's words, added to Sir John's fine military qualities an even temper, a cool judgment, a broad outlook, and an aloofness from politics' (III, 293), Lord Kitchener was absent at the Dardanelles.

It was this resolution to co-operate absolutely with the French which was the basis of Lord Kitchener's action. With characteristic intuition he had foreseen that the Germans, having once violated Belgian neutrality, would not confine themselves to the south of the Meuse; and, anticipating their great enveloping movement against the Allied left, he had protested against concentrating the B.E.F. so far forward (111, 22). But he bowed to the necessity of conforming to the plans of our Allies, just as, when the retreat came, it was in accordance with his instructions (cf. III, 50) that the British fell back upon Paris, instead of playing into the enemy's hands by retiring on the Channel ports, on which von Kluck had persuaded himself we must fall back (cf. 'The March on Paris,' passim). But it is noteworthy that, though he was strongly in favour of unification of military control, he set his face absolutely against anything like the Versailles Council of 1917, and would not hear of 'arming an international council with executive powers' (III, 262).

It was mainly because of his resolution to do nothing to jeopardise the position in the West or to fall short in the assistance which we could give to our French allies, that Lord Kitchener's handling of the problems which the East presented was less happy in its results. To him the hope of doing something in the East was specially dear. Over-anxiety for Egypt (cf. Gallipoli Diary,' 1, 165, and II, 232) may have warped his judgment; his knowledge of the probable effects of a successful blow at Turkey may have induced him to attempt more than our available means could justify; but, whatever the reason, in the Gallipoli affair he shows to least advantage.

If ever during the war a blow struck in the East might have been decisive, it was in the spring of 1915. The state of the Balkans, the situation, military and political, in Russia, England's unreadiness to put forth her whole strength, made the scheme of resolving the the Western deadlock by vigorous action in the East