We can start with the indisputable and undisputed fact that so far as the war on land was concerned this country was entirely unprepared to take up the rôle it has since assumed. That is a proposition which not even the Germans, who are so ready to accuse England of having caused the War, can very well dispute. Throughout our history we have been a naval and not a military Power, though it is of course true that, judged by the standards of other days, we have now and again put forward very considerable military efforts.
But it was many a long year since British troops had fought on the Continent of Europe, and it is safe to assume that the great majority of people in this country, had they been asked, would have replied without hesitation that we should never again take part in the land fighting in a continental war.
Now it must be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to give the matter a moments thought that, for the purposes of war as it is understood by the great military nations of Europe, the British Army as it existed in August, 1914, was hopelessly inadequate. Our real strength lay on the sea, where it has always lain. It is true that, for its size, the British force which was thrown into Flanders in the early days of the struggle was perhaps the most perfectly trained and equipped army that ever took the field.
But no one will contend that it was adequate in size, and we know that the Germans regarded it as a contemptible little army that was to be brushed aside with hardly an effort by the German hordes. It consisted of perhaps 120,000 men, and undoubtedly, as our French friends have generously admitted, it played a part worthy of the best and highest traditions of our race. But it was not an army on the continental scale.
What has been done since? How have we taken up the task of creating forces which might be regarded as commensurate to meet the menace by which civilisation found itself faced?
Our contemptible little army, thanks to the genius of Lord Kitchener, has grown until to-day it numbers something in the neighbourhood of four million men. That is a fact which the world knows and recognises, and in itself alone it is sufficient to refute the contention of those who are to be found preaching in and out of season that Britains efforts have been lamentably inadequate. Great armies are not to be made in a day or a year, they do not spring fully armed from the earth, and the fact that we, a naval rather than a military Power, have in the course of eighteen months raised and equipped forces on such a scale ought to be sufficient to confound those shallow critics who are eternally bewailing our supposed slackness, which, as a matter of fact, has no existence outside their own disordered imaginations. I do not believe there is to be found to-day a military writer whose opinion is of any value who would not agree that the effort which Britain has made is one of the most stupendous in all military history.
In France, in Russia, and in Italy everyone whose authority is regarded as having any substantial basis is agreed on the point, and the Germans themselves, however they may affect to sneer at our army of hirelings, know a great deal too much about military matters not to recognise that one of the very gravest of their perils is the growing military power of England. That power will be exercised to the full when the time comes, and it will assuredly be found to be of the very greatest importance in bringing about the overthrow of German hopes and ambitions.
We all know the whole world knows why the military power of England has not yet reached its full majesty. We all know that in the War of to-day a superabundance of munitions is demanded which none could have expected from the history of the past. Every form of military stores guns, rifles, shell, ammunition all must be provided on a scale of colossal magnitude.
It is the fact that Germany alone of all the warring nations partly realised this, and in her careful preparations for a war of her own seeking, for which she chose her own time, accumulated in the days of peace such enormous reserves of munitions as she hoped would render her to a large extent independent of manufacture during the actual period of fighting. It is certain that Germany hoped to overthrow Russia and France in a series of swift, brief attacks without trenching dangerously upon her reserve stocks. We know now that she was wrong; but we know, too, that she came within an ace of success.
That she realised her error and embarked upon the manufacture of munitions on a vast scale is true, but none the less it is also true that she cannot hope to compete in this respect with the united resources of the Allies once they get into their full stride. Slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely, she is being overtaken even in the department which she made almost exclusively her own, and the day is coming when she will have not the remotest prospect of keeping up an adequate reply to the storm of high explosives which will break upon her lines east, west, north, and south. When that day comes and it may be nearer than most of us think we shall see the swiftest of changes in the present position of the War. There will be an end at last to the long deadlock in which we and our Allies have been forced to act on the defensive.
Already, indeed, the change is in sight. Germany to-day, in spite of her frantic struggles, is absolutely and firmly held in a ring of steel. She is, in every real sense of the word, on the defensive; her spasmodic attacks are purely defensive in their origin and conception, and the steadily increasing pressure of her foes must sooner or later find and break through some weak spot in lines which are already seriously extended and must soon wear thin.
I do not pretend for a moment that everything has gone as well as we could wish; I do not pretend that there have not been mistakes, delays, lack of decision, lack of foresight. No war was ever fought without mistakes; we are not a race of supermen. But I do say that we have made such an effort as has perhaps never been made in history before to meet a series of conditions of which neither we in particular nor the world at large has ever experienced.
The nation that could wage war without making mistakes would very speedily dominate the world.
If the Germans had not made mistakes at least as great as those of the Allies, they would long ago have won a supreme and crushing victory which would have left the whole of Europe prostrate at their feet. Whereas what do we see to-day? The plain, unalterable fact is that in her sudden assault upon nations wholly unprepared for it Germany has not won a single success of the nature which is decisive. She did not succeed in knocking out either of the enemies who really count, and she soon found herself condemned to a long and dragging war of the very nature which all her experts, for years past, have admitted must be fatal to German hopes and ambitions. Germany has always postulated for success swift and shattering blows; she believed she could deal such blows at her enemies in detail before she was defeated by a prepared unity against which she must be powerless. She hoped to shatter France before the slow-moving Russians could get into their stride, and leave her ruined and crushed while she turned to meet the menace from the East. She counted on winning the hegemony of Europe before she could be checked by a combination ready to meet her on more than level terms. There she made the first and greatest of her mistakes, a mistake from the effects of which she can never recover.
And will anyone contend that, in bringing the German design to hopeless ruin, Britain has not played a worthy part? Will anyone be found bold enough to assert that the position on the Continent to-day would not have been very widely different if Britain had chosen the ignoble part and refused to unsheath the sword in defence of those great principles for which our forefathers in all ages have been ready to fight and to die? Will anyone venture to express a doubt that, but for the assistance of Britain, France must have been crushed? And, with France helpless and Britain neutral, what would have been Russias chance of escaping disaster?