My Second Year of the War | Page 3

back in the old groove, the groove of war,
with war seeming as normal in England as peace seemed in the United
States.
In London, recruiting posters with their hectic urgings to the manhood
of England to volunteer no longer blanketed the hoardings and the
walls of private buildings. Conscription had come. Every able-bodied
man must now serve at the command of the government. England
seemed to have greater dignity. The war was wholly master of her
proud individualism, which had stubbornly held to its faith that the man
who fought best was he who chose to fight rather than he who was
ordered to fight.
There was a new Chief of Staff at the War Office, Sir William
Robertson, who had served for seven years as a private before he
received his commission as an officer, singularly expressing in his
career the character of the British system, which leaves open to merit
the door at the head of a long stairway which calls for hard climbing.
England believes in men and he had earned his way to the direction of
the most enormous plant with the largest personnel which the British
Empire had ever created.
It was somewhat difficult for the caller to comprehend the full extent of
the power and responsibility of this self-made leader at his desk in a
great room overlooking Whitehall Place, for he had so simplified an
organization that had been brought into being in two years that it
seemed to run without any apparent effort on his part. The methods of
men who have great authority interest us all. I had first seen Sir
William at a desk in a little room of a house in a French town when his

business was that of transport and supply for the British Expeditionary
Force. Then he moved to a larger room in the same town, as Chief of
Staff of the army in France. Now he had a still larger one and in
London.
I had heard much of his power of application, which had enabled him
to master languages while he was gaining promotion step by step; but I
found that the new Chief of Staff of the British Army was not "such a
fool as ever to overwork," as one of his subordinates said, and no slave
to long hours of drudgery at his desk.
"Besides his routine," said another subordinate, speaking of Sir
William's method, "he has to do a great deal of thinking." This passing
remark was most illuminating. Sir William had to think for the whole.
He had trained others to carry out his plans, and as former head of 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