Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 | Page 8

of liars. They had been
acting as fools if they had failed to interpret auguries which presented
no difficulty whatever to people of ordinary intelligence who took the
trouble to watch events. They had been acting as knaves if they had
been drawing their salaries and had not earned them by making
themselves acquainted with facts which it was their bounden duty to
know. They had been acting as liars if, when fully aware of the German
preparations for aggressive war and of what these portended, they had
deliberately deceived and hoodwinked the countrymen who trusted
them. (Personally, I should be disposed to acquit them of having been
fools or knaves--but I may be wrong.) Several Ministers had indeed
deliberately stated in their places in Parliament that the nation's military
arrangements were not framed to meet anything beyond the despatch to
an oversea theatre of war of four out of the six divisions of our
Expeditionary Force! One of the gang had even been unable "to
conceive circumstances in which continental operations by our troops
would not be a crime against the people of this country."
Much has been said and written since 1914 concerning the
unpreparedness of the army for war. But the truth is that the army was
not unprepared for that limited-liability, pill-to-stop-an-earthquake
theory of making war which represented the programme of Mr. Asquith
and his colleagues before the blow fell. Take it all round, the
Expeditionary Force was as efficient as any allied or hostile army
which took the field. It was almost as well prepared for the supreme
test in respect to equipment as it was in respect to leadership and

training. The country and the Government, not the army, were
unprepared. There was little wrong with the military forces except that
they represented merely a drop in the ocean, that they constituted no
more than an advanced guard to legions which did not exist. Still one
must acknowledge that (as will be pointed out further on) even some of
our highest military authorities did not realize what an insignificant
asset our splendid little Expeditionary Force would stand for in a great
European war, nor to have grasped when the crash came that the matter
of paramount importance in connection with the conduct of the struggle
on land was the creation of a host of fighting men reaching such
dimensions as to render it competent to play a really vital rôle in
achieving victory for the Entente.
As it happened, I had proceeded as a private individual in the month of
June 1914 to inspect the German railway developments directed
towards the frontiers of Belgium and of Luxemburg. This was an
illuminating, indeed an ominous, experience. Entering the Kaiser's
dominions by the route from the town of Luxemburg to Trèves, one
came of a sudden upon a colossal detraining station that was not quite
completed, fulfilling no conceivable peaceful object and dumped down
on the very frontier--anything more barefaced it would be difficult to
conceive. Trèves itself, three or four miles on, constituted a vast
railway centre, and three miles or so yet farther along there was its
counterpart in another great railway centre where there was no town at
all. You got Euston, Liverpool Street, and Waterloo--only the lines and
sidings, of course--grown up like mushrooms in a non-populous and
non-industrial region, and at the very gates of a little State of which
Germany had guaranteed the neutrality.
Traversing the region to the north of the Moselle along the western
German border-line, this proved to be a somewhat barren, partly
woodland, partly moorland, tract, sparsely inhabited as Radnor and
Strathspey; and yet this unproductive district had become a network of
railway communications. Elaborate detraining stations were passed
every few miles. One constantly came upon those costly overhead
cross-over places, where one set of lines is carried right over the top of
another set at a junction, so that continuous traffic going one way shall

not be checked by traffic coming in from the side and proceeding in the
opposite direction--a plan seldom adopted at our most important
railway centres. On one stretch of perhaps half-a-dozen miles
connecting two insignificant townships were to be seen eight lines
running parallel to each other. Twopenny-halfpenny little trains
doddered along, occasionally taking up or putting down a single
passenger at some halting-place that was large enough to serve a
Coventry or a Croydon. The slopes of the cuttings and sidings were
destitute of herbage; the bricks of the culverts and bridges showed them
by the colour to be brand-new; all this construction had taken place
within the previous half-dozen years. Everything seemed to be
absolutely ready except that one place on the Luxemburg frontier
mentioned above, and that obviously could be completed in a few hours
of smart work, if